University of Technology Sydney launches hands-on bioprocessing training to bridge skills gap

Biotech News: As the global pandemic continues to encourage the Australian government to support the biotech and biopharmaceutical industry with funding, there is still another gap. 

According to Cytiva’s insights from industry clients, the bottleneck of finding trained personnel and training personnel is an everyday challenge. 

That is why Cytiva partnered with the University of Technology Sydney to bring the Biologics Innovation Facility (BIF) to life. The facility provides hands-on teaching and training experiences by being the only institute in Australia and South East Asia delivering training programs from the Dublin-based National Institute of Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT).

BIF Manager, Dr Edwin Huang, said “The NIBRT courses are a timely fit with the Australian Government’s Modern Manufacturing Strategy that recognises the medical manufacturing sector as a national priority area. This includes the biotech and pharmaceutical manufacturing sectors where access to a skilled workforce is essential for industry to take advantages of opportunities to up-scale and innovate. Training is critical for Australia to achieve recognition as a high quality and sustainable manufacturing nation.”

The BIF training courses offer a unique opportunity for students, technicians, engineers and scientists to up-skill and advance their skills and bioprocessing knowledge. 

This state-of-the-art Cytiva single-use biomanufacturing facility is based on a 200L process to produce monoclonal antibodies and other recombinant products. The facility has been built with the capability to use different mammalian expression platforms and has also been future proofed to accommodate an expansion to 1000L process bioreactor.

Cytiva’s ANZ Commercial Leader, Jon Ince, couldn’t agree more and said “UTS has been a wonderful partner to work with and it’s been a pleasure to help them to bring this facility to life. Walking distance from Sydney’s Central Station, the facility provides the ever-growing biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry in Australia a place to train and develop staff.

“This has become a real need recently as bringing in international expertise into Australia is increasing challenging with the presence of COVID-19. With State and Federal Governments investing in increasing Sovereign manufacturing capability, the BIF is well placed to train the next generation of Australian manufacturing workers. With the BIF also serving as a Process Development ‘Sandbox’ for start-up biotech, the opportunities to build a wider biotech ecosystem in Australia now exists more than ever before,” he added.

BIF Training courses allow participants to actively apply their knowledge in hands-on lab and pilot-scale experiments with a focus on the emerging trend of single-use technology in biologics manufacturing. 

The current courses on offer now are:

• Introduction to Bioprocessing
• Single-use technologies in Upstream Bioprocessing Operations
• Single-use technologies in Downstream Bioprocessing Operations.

Contact the BIF for more information.

Photo credit – Andrew Worssam