Fall 2020 Professor - Dr. Caryn Heldt

I came to Michigan Tech as an undergrad and knew that I wanted to be an engineer. As I went through my degree, I was pulled more and more into the healthcare aspects of engineering. When I started my PhD, I was determined to have a strong biology aspect to my work. During my PhD, I started working with viruses and I was taken with their complexity. Since then, I have been trying to find simple ways to describe them and measure their chemical properties, because every engineer knows that our job is to try and simplify our world.

With my focus on the biological aspects of chemical engineering, I bring a little bit of biology into each of my classes. Many people do not think about chemical engineers knowing biology, but it is an important subset of our discipline. I like to give my students a large range of examples so they can pick the subset of chemical engineering that best suits their interests.

In the past five years, the emergence of gene therapy is shaking up the biotherapeutic industry. Gene therapy first went into clinical trials in the early 2000’s. When two patients died, the trials were halted. However, about ten years later, another trial was started and the patient was on steroids. The suppression of the immune system provided a way to safely administer gene therapies. Now, over 200 clinical trials are being conducted worldwide and 5 FDA approved products are on the market in the US. However, there is still a real fear that as diseases that require higher dosages start to make their way through clinical trial, there will be shortages of life saving therapies because we cannot manufacture enough active ingredient.

There are not enough people with expertise in the purification of viral products. There are many people that can purify proteins and other biotherapeutics, but the explosion of viral products on the market is creating a gap of people that understand the purification of large, complex nanostructures.

Michigan Tech has allowed me to work with people here that are interested in materials and chemicals that inactivate pathogens. It has been fun to explore different ideas and inactivation pathways with my Michigan Tech collaborators.

Our next goal is to create a method to produce and purify viral particles in a continuous process. All biotherapeutics are made in batch processes. A continuous process would produce more product in a smaller plant, require less manual operations, and allow a plant to be flexible and make multiple products. Other industries have made this transition and now it the biotherapeutic industry’s turn to figure out how to run continuously.