A Chemistry Professor Discusses Microalgae Biomanufacturing
Professor Valerie Ward, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Microalgae Biomanufacturing Lab at the University of Waterloo, a public research university in Ontario, Canada, talks about her biomedical and biotech research interests. Ward is engaged with microalgae biomanufacturing using biological processes to manufacture products like antibiotics or proteins for pharmaceutical applications.
“Biomanufacturing is using biological processes to manufacture something, possibly an antibiotic or a protein for a pharmaceutical application,” says Ward. “Sometimes you’re lucky and you find a bacteria or algae or other host cell that can produce tons of the product that you’re interested in, but most of the time biological systems did not evolve to make the product that you want. So, you often have to kind of push them – and we do that using recombinant DNA technology and synthetic biology.”