Industrial Biotechnology

Course contents

Applied Fermentation Technology and Kinetics
- Metabolic Engineering
- Production of Antibiotics, Amino Acids, BioPharmaceuticals and Vaccines
- Downstream Processing Techniques for High and Low Molecular Weight Products
- Technical Evolution of Bioprocesses
- Rational Design of Bioprocesses
- Industrial Biotransformations

The diverse facets of Industrial Biotechnology will be presented on examples of real industrial processes and their additional needs in comparison to text-book publications. After an overview of modern biotechnological products in everyday life highly complex molecules will be adressed which can only be produced economically by fermentation of microorganisms and / or chemoenzymatic conversions. Therefore large-scale industrial fermentations and their control and optimization will be covered in detail. Especially the chemically very sensitive beta-lactam-antibiotics penicillin and cephalosporin will be presented from fermentation via downstream-processing to the production of their key intermediates 6-APA and 7-ACA. These antibiotics and key intermediates were already produced in the 1950th and 1960th with the help of enzymes due to their chemical sensitivity. The development of such chemoenzymatic processes, enzyme improvement, isolation and immobilization techniques will be discussed . As example for semisynthetic antibiotics the development of production processes for chiral molecule amoxycillin are trained including the switch-over from a highly pollutant chemical to a very elegant enzymatic synthesis-process.
Semisynthetic beta-lactam antibiotics and their production processes have seen numerous development- and optimization phases due to pharmacological-, feasibility-, quality-, cost- and environmental-reasons. Molecule structures had to be modified due to up-coming resistances against beta-lactam antibiotics, especially MRSA ( methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus ). One development were combination products of "old penicillins" with beta-lactamase-inhibitors like amoxycillin / clavulanic acid and brand-new also with semisynthetic cephalosporins like ceftazidime / avibactam.
On the example of the development and optimization of the Hoechst human insulin E. coli process improvement potentials in industrial biotechnology will be trained on all elements of the value chain including the use of protein-sequence specific process enzymes As latest example the important development of the mRNA-vaccines by BionTech / Pfizer and Moderna and their production process will be presented and discussed .
Dr. Koenig has been working for more than 40 years in large scale-productions plants of the Biotech-industry and Big Pharma, was project-leader for the recombinant human insulin E. coli process of Hoechst and later production head for antibiotics. before he was also involved in the development of newer chemoenzymatic processes for several pharmaceuticals.

Department

Master's Program Biotechnology