The primary goal of this course is to teach the principles of bioprocess engineering in a way that is accessible to biological scientists, bioengineers, and others who have little or no background in chemical engineering.
The course will: Define bioprocessing – Challenges and opportunities for bioprocessing in the 21st century; Describe and develop basic process flow diagram and flow sheet; Differentiate between upstream and downstream processing; Identify key unit operations in upstream and downstream processes; Identify major items of bioprocessing equipment and their basic function(s) in in a biomanufacturing setting; Establish differences in protein production using bacteria, yeast, animal, and plant cells; Describe key principles involved in bioreactor design and operation; Compare and contrast batch, fed-batch and continuous modes of bioreactor operation; Discuss scale-up of bioreactors and criteria to consider in bioreactor scale-up; Describe factors that impact cell growth and metabolism; Discuss the importance of monitoring culture pH, oxygen, temperature and major metabolites in bioreactors; Discuss primary recovery and some of the ways in which protein products are harvested; Describe downstream processes and some of the key unit operations for purification; Describe the importance of viral clearance and inactivation in purified protein products; Describe Buffer exchange and concentration operation using tangential flow filtration; Describe the formulation of purified protein products; Describe the term biosimilars and discuss the development and regulation of biosimilars.
MEng program students only