503176 - INDUSTRIAL BIOTECHNOLOGIES

courses

ID:

503176

Duration (hours):

48

CFU:

SSD:

CHIMICA E BIOTECNOLOGIA DELLE FERMENTAZIONI

Year:

2025

Date/time interval

Primo Semestre (24/09/2025 - 16/01/2026)

Course Objectives

Introducing the students to approaches, problems and trade-off situations typical of industrial workplaces in the biotech sector. Provide the students with the tools and knowledge necessary to analyze and develop an industrial research project in the biotech area. Provide students with experience of team working in interdisciplinary contexts by creating tailor-made case studies for open discussion in the classroom and during the exam.

Course Prerequisites

The course is intended for students who have achieved the final stage of their education programme and are thus ready to apply the theoretical and practical knowledge acquired so far to the development of autonomous and original ideas for the proposal/optimization of industrial projects concerning biotechnological processes/products. The knowledge acquired during the Bachelor degree programmes in Biotechnology or Biology fully complies with the prerequisites to attend this course.

Teaching Methods

Lectures. Prof. Selva and Prof. Ubiali will be always in the classroom at the same time. Seminars of experts from research centres and chemical companies will be also given. Simulations of industrial cases and problems will be run during the course and the impact assessment of the solutions proposed by the students will be analyzed. Real-life cases from different industrial backgrounds which reflect different process/product development stages will be proposed. A particular emphasis will be given to the multidisciplinary approach required by a biotech process developed to obtain new bioactive molecules or APIs, either by fermentation or by biocatalysis. Case-studies from scientific literature will be presented to stimulate class discussions about approaches, issues and decision processes typical of the industrial environment. Specific sessions will be dedicated to introduce objectives and modalities of the exam, including guidelines for the use of generative AI tools. Lecture attendance is not mandatory but is highly recommended to enhance class interaction. For students with specific needs, who cannot attend in person the teaching activities and who have applied for Inclusive Teaching Methods, teaching material suitable for a profitable independent study will be available. If requested, self-learning can be supported by tutoring activities of integrative teaching, and by dedicated meetings, also online, with flexible hours according to needs.

Assessment Methods

Oral exam. Mode: Simulation of a meeting in a biotech company with the professors in the role of R&D supervisors. Students are required to organize themselves as a research team (max 5 people/team) and to analyze an experimental protocol pre-selected by the professors. The team is required to plan the execution of the analyzed protocol by reporting in their lab notebook the procedure that they would apply in order to perform this experiment. As a general scheme, the team should report in their lab notebook the reaction, the amounts and ratios of reactants used, taking into account the reaction scale and specific preparations of the reagents (if any), the equipment, reaction monitoring, setting intermediate and final endpoints, and measuring the final output(s) (e.g. conversion, yield, downstream, analytical characterization etc.). Students are also requested to consider how they would organize and archive the collected data (reporting) as well as the repository of the product(s) obtained. In the pre-exam stage, each team member should analyze the protocol individually. The result of the individual analysis should be then discussed within the team (peer review). The review within the team would result in the final procedure that will be presented and discussed with the exam Committee. The team as a whole is responsible for the procedure discussed with the Committee. Each team member must have a role in the presentation/discussion with the exam Committee. After the technical analysis of the paper, a discussion about the potential industrial application of the results achieved in the paper will take place. Following the guidelines given by the professors before the exam, the team is required to identify a customer potentially interested in product/process derived from the protocol. Accordingly, the team will identify the desirable product/process specifications to fit the customer (unanswered) needs and, starting from the state of the art, the team will develop a realistic work plan of what needs to be done in a proposed timeframe (Gantt chart) to get the target product/process/service. Each student of the team has a specific role in the project and is required to present his/her contribution to the R&D supervisors. Appropriate examination methods are provided for students who fall into the categories of Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) and Special Educational Needs (SEN). Evaluation criteria: the evaluation will take into account to what extent the student will be able to: -understand the selected experimental protocol; -defend the proposed technical analysis of the protocol as well as the project proposal; -highlight and describe the issues (if any) related to the examined case study; -propose original ideas for solving problems/circumvent bottlenecks that might arise during the case study discussion. Correctness of contents, completeness of answers, property of language, and knowledge of technical terminology will be assessed. The individual evaluation will be integrated with the evaluation of the overall work of the team. The exam will be passed if students achieve a grade in the 18-30 cum laude range.

Texts

Slides used during lectures and papers (provided as pdf files or links, also available in the Kiro website). Most of the texts are in English. K. Faber “Biotransformations in Organic Chemistry – A textbook” Springer Ed., 2018 AA.VV. “Biocatalysis for Practitioners. Techniques, Reactions and Applications”, Wiley-VCH, 2021 M.S. Robescu, D. Ubiali et al. "Stepping into the Biocatalysis Lab for Undergraduate Students: From Enzyme Immobilization to Product Isolation". Journal of Chemical Education, 2024, 101(7), pp. 2790–2795, doi: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c01254

The course aims at introducing the students to approaches typical of the biotech industry by examining industrial cases of research and development of bioactive molecules. Starting from a case-study of a well-known antibiotic, the interdisciplinary and complex discovery process of bioactive molecules produced by microorganisms will be examined. The process development for the supply of a bioactive microbial product will be then presented by examining fermentation, down processing and strain development. The multiple interactions of these approaches will be discussed, along with the issues of process management, industrial organization, team working and intellectual property in the cases of small molecules and biologicals. Some case-studies of process development for the synthesis of APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) by biocatalysis will be presented. Advantages and disadvantages of using isolated enzymes as biocatalysts in organic chemistry will be discussed, with a focus on the most used enzymes in industry (hydrolases, transferases, oxidoreductases). The pipeline of the development of a biocatalytic process will cover the selection of the enzyme, the “transformation” of the selected enzyme into a biocatalyst active and stable under the operative conditions dictated by the specific industrial process, the enzymatic reaction set up, the scale-up of the biotransformation, and the product downstream. The product development process will be subsequently examined in view of regulatory requirements and emerging medical needs. Cases of anti-infective drugs will be examined, from the development stage to their therapeutic use. The lifecycle of a drug and the business models of Big Pharma and Biotech companies will be also discussed.