UMBC chemical engineering students win first place in the 2023 Mid-Atlantic Regional AIChE ChemE Jeopardy Competition. Thus, qualifying for the 2023 National AIChE ChemE Jeopardy Competition in Orlando, FL in November as part of the AIChE National Conference. This is the fourth year in a row a UMBC team qualified for the National AIChE ChemE Jeopardy Competition.

Eighteen teams competed during the AIChE ChemE Jeopardy Mid-Atlantic Competition held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, including two teams from UMBC. After the preliminary rounds, the UMBC teams placed first and second in the semi-finals, tied at 9 points each. The semifinal round was a knockout round, and UMBC’s ‘Team One’ advanced to the finals. The final round of competition was between UMBC, Johns Hopkins University (2nd place) and Stony Brook University (3rd place). 

The success of both teams is the result of consistent hard work and support from the teams’ faculty advisors are Dr. Neha Raikar and Dr. Mariajosé Castellanos as well as other students. Taylor deSilva, chemical engineering ‘23, is instrumental in preparing the teams for competition by organizing weekly practices including setting up sample game boards. 

Team One

• Ethan Banks, chemical engineering, traditional track ‘24
• Paul Loberg, chemical engineering, biotechnology and bioengineering track ‘24
• Max Bobbin, chemical engineering, environmental engineering & sustainability track ‘23
• Catherine Wraback - chemical engineering, traditional track ‘23

Team Two

• Pavan Umashankar, chemical engineering, biotechnology and bioengineering track ‘24

• Colin Jones,  chemical engineering, biotechnology and bioengineering track ‘25

• Jacob Craft, chemical engineering, environmental engineering & sustainability track ‘24
• Zachary Bogart, chemical engineering, environmental engineering & sustainability track ‘23

UMBC CBEE students and advisor at the AIChE 2023 Mid-Atlantic Student Regional Conference, April 22-23

Photo Credit: Max Bobbin

Back to front;  Pavan Umashankar, Paul Loberg, Caton , David Ni, Zachary Bogart, Ben Willing, Catherine Wraback, Jacob Craft, Colin Jones, Neha Sian, Dr. Neha Raikar, Sarah Donyaee, Afrah Ahmed, Ethan Banks, Max Bobbin. 

AIChE Conference Chem-E Jeopardy Competition Bracket 

UMBC teams placed 1st and 2nd in the Semi Finals round, tied at 9 points. 

A new way to make a virus-fighting protein could save lives during the next pandemic 

The quick and portable production process, described in a newly accepted paper in the journal New Biotechnology, could be easily deployed at the source of a future virus outbreak

A multidisciplinary research team has produced a promising virus-fighting protein using a quick, portable process that could be easily deployed at the source of a future virus outbreak. The team includes researchers from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Stanford University, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Center for Advanced Translational Science. The research has been accepted for publication in the journal New Biotechnology.

Griffithsin is a protein originally isolated from red algae. More than a decade ago, researchers in the Molecular Targets Program of the NCI discovered it could protect cells from the HIV virus and it is now in Phase 1 clinical trials in humans. Griffithsin sticks to the surface glycoproteins of certain viruses, making it difficult for the virus to enter host cells. (Glycoproteins are proteins with sugar molecules on them.)

“It’s like taking clay and sticking it to the prongs of an electrical plug to prevent it from entering a socket,” says Govind Rao, a professor of chemical and biochemical engineering at UMBC who is one of the lead researchers on the project. The protein disables a wide range of viruses, including the virus that causes COVID-19.

Medicines that are made with biological molecules like griffithsin are called biologics. They are normally manufactured in huge batches using living cells such as E.coli bacteria. (The cells are given DNA-encoded instructions for how to make the medicine.) However, that method has drawbacks, including the need to keep the cells alive. 

Rao and his colleagues developed a method to manufacture griffithsin that does not require living cells. Instead, the researchers take the protein-manufacturing “guts” out of the cells. Into this soup of cellular components, they then add the DNA instructions for making griffithsin, along with the needed molecular building blocks. 

“The cellular machinery still works, even without a living cell to support it,” says Rao. “The method is simple and effective.”

Using cell-free manufacturing methods, the researchers produced significant quantities of griffithsin in less than 24 hours. They purified the protein to strict standards and demonstrated in lab experiments that it could disable both HIV and SARS-CoV-2 virusesas effectively as the same griffithsin protein made by living cells.

The researchers envision that the method could be quickly deployed to make antiviral medicine at the origin of disease outbreaks. The method could be easily adapted to work with a portable, suitcase-sized biologics manufacturing device, dubbed Bio-MOD, that Rao and a team of mostly UMBC researchers recently developed. They described the device in a 2018 paper in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

The new griffithsin protein manufacturing process together with the portable Bio-MOD device could be a powerful weapon to quickly combat new viruses before they spread.

read full article: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/985854

Excerpt from ''AI scientist' brings us a step closer to the age of machine-generated scientific discovery"

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How To Develop Safe And Effective Medications | Exploring The Next Generation Of Therapeutics

What will the next generation of medicine production look like? Dr. Govind Rao is a Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and the Director of the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) joins us today to discuss the importance of constructing safe and effective medications – standards that are harder to reach than one may think…

Listen to Govind Rao here: bit.ly/3KdhTr7

Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/30PvU9C

Research led by Dr. Govind Rao, Director of Center for Advanced Sensor Technology and professor in the department of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering is featured in a recent article posted on leaps.org titled “With This New Technology, Hospitals and Pharmacies Could Make Vaccines and Medicines Onsite, 2023” The story was written based on a preprint of a paper with Shayan Borhani, Chemical Engineering PhD candidate as the first author. Aaron Thole, Chemical Engineering PhD student and Dr. Doug Frey, professor in the department of Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering are also co-authors. (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.19.521044v1).

The article describes a process to develop a compelling pandemic mitigation strategy to promptly suppress viral emergence at the source of an outbreak using proteins such as GRFT which are efficacious in neutralizing a broad range of viruses. This process is shown to produce a product with consistent purity and potency in less than 24 hours using cell-free biomanufacturing. 

The collaborators demonstrated GRFT production using two independent cell-free systems, one plant and one microbial. Griffithsin purity and quality were verified using standard regulatory metrics. Efficacy was demonstrated in vitro against SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 and was nearly identical to that of GRFT expressed in vivo. The proposed production process is efficient and can be readily scaled up and deployed anywhere in the world where a viral pathogen might emerge. The current emergence of viral variants has resulted in frequent updating of existing vaccines and loss of efficacy for front-line monoclonal antibody therapies.

Dr. Rao wants to advance technology to the point where any hospital or pharmacy could load up the media containing molecular factories, mix up the necessary amino acids, nucleotides, and enzymes, and harvest the medications in a matter of hours. This will enable on-site and on-demand medication production. Once this approach is thoroughly validated it might revolutionize medicine-making even outside of hospitals and pharmacies and extend beyond urgent situations.