BASF and three universities have established a new PhD training program. It will equip students with the knowledge and skills to improve scale-up techniques for producing chemicals, food ingredients, and materials more sustainably, or to create entirely novel products. The company views biotechnology as a key driver for a more sustainable chemical industry.
“Its success, however, depends on scalability and cost competitiveness. That’s why we’re excited to join this program in biomanufacturing, equipping future scientists with the skills and mindset to turn ideas into viable industrial solutions,” says Averina Nicolae, PhD, open innovation manager at BASF. “We offer students real-world challenges, a holistic view of technical, economic, and regulatory factors, and the inspiration to become innovators.”
“In the lab we might be working with one liter or ten liters, whereas industry works with thousands of liters, and there is often a gap in both understanding and training when we have to move from one to the other,” adds Sonja Billerbeck, PhD, of the department of bioengineering at Imperial College London, who is co-director of the program that also involves University College London (UCL) and Aberystwyth University. “We are trying to bridge that gap, so that graduates learn what they need to know in order to use these processes at a really large scale.”
The program, called the Sustainable Centre for AI-Leveraged Efficiency in Industrial Biotechnology (SCALE-IB), is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), with support from BASF, Bühler, and a range of other companies with an interest in engineering biology.
“The commitment of BBSRC to support in-depth knowledge building and excellence in engineering biology for the food system reflects the need for innovation in an economically critical sector,” says Ian Robert, PhD, Bühler’s CTO.
Expertise and resources
The companies, from multinationals to startups, will provide expertise and resources for the training program and offer students placements so that they can get firsthand experience of biomanufacturing at scale. This includes sourcing and handling the feedstock on which the cells or microorganisms feed, the configuration of fermenters and other processes to support their growth, through to extracting and refining the final products.
“We have partners along this whole biomanufacturing chain, so we can train students in every aspect of that process,” says Billerbeck. “In this way they can develop the systems thinking they need, so that when they engineer their cells and design their processes, they already know what they are aiming for in terms of the product, how it will be produced, and how it will be regulated.”
“Scaling innovations from the lab to industrial reality is a complex and challenging process,” points out Darren Budd, PhD, managing director, BASF. “Partnering with leading universities such as Imperial, UCL, and Aberystwyth allows us to bring together brilliant minds but most importantly align research with real-world processes and requirements from the start. These kinds of collaborations are crucial for bridging the gap between the discovery and the deployment of new technologies.”
The three universities delivering the training program have complementary expertise when it comes to engineering biology and a history of collaboration in the discipline. Imperial has extensive expertise in engineering biology and AI, with a strong focus on developing alternative food products at the UKRI Microbial Food Hub and the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein. Spanning seven academic departments, this center aims to advance research into precision fermentation, cultivated meat, bioprocessing, automation, nutrition, and AI and machine learning.
The UCL department of biochemical engineering has expertise in process engineering that will underpin the industrial application of fermentation and bioconversion technologies, specifically, at the Manufacturing Futures Lab at UCL East.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth will lead on technical training and equality, diversity and inclusion matters, and develop students’ expertise in biotechnology scaleup in its pilot-scale biorefinery. Co-located with Aberinnovation, a BBSRC-supported innovation hub, the institute can also draw on AI expertise from the department of computer science.
Both UCL and Aberystwyth University participate in the Bezos Center, operating one of its national ‘spokes’ through the EPSRC Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub.
Range of backgrounds
The program is aimed at graduates with a range of backgrounds, from the life sciences to chemistry, food science, and AI and data science, but also business and regulation.
“We want our cohorts to have diverse expertise, for peer learning, and we have different types of supervisors who can take on these students and guide their projects, ideally in a highly collaborative fashion,” says Billerbeck, adding that those who complete the training will be well-placed to move into industry, where there is an urgent need for people with engineering biology and scale-up skills. “We currently don’t produce graduates who can immediately step into key roles in a company like BASF, for example, to take on critical scale-up projects,” she continues.
Another likely career path is in entrepreneurship and startups. “Many startups are good at reaching technology readiness levels of four or five, where they can produce something at 10 liters,” according to Billerbeck. “But when they need to move forward and produce more in order to become economically viable, there is also a skills or knowledge gap about how to approach this scaling.”
Other options include working on regulation, which is particularly relevant for biomanufactured food products and ingredients, or continuing in academia or education.
The training program begins this month, with a total of 28 PhDs likely to be offered over the three years of the program. These numbers may grow as further industrial partners are brought on board to co-create and co-fund projects.
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