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Erick Gutierrez ('18) receives ACS Young Professional Award

Erick Gutierrez was selected as the recipient of the Young Professionals Award in Upstream and Downstream Processing for his poster “Microscale Chromatography toolkits for rapid screening and purification of therapeutic proteins” presented at the 2019 Orlando Meeting. 

This award recognizes excellence by a non-student member of the BIOT 3M Separation and Purification Sciences Division and ACS-BIOT (American Chemical Society’s Division of Biochemical Technology) for Young Professionals in Upstream & Downstream Processing. This award is given to professionals 35 years of age or younger who present outstanding research in upstream and downstream processing at the poster session as part of the Division of Biochemical Technology (BIOT) programming at the ACS annual meeting.  The 3M Company is the sponsor for this award.

The 2019 BIOT Award for Young Professionals in Upstream & Downstream Processing will be awarded as part of 2020 Spring National Meeting, in Philadelphia, PA from March 22 - 26.

Research Overview: 

Introduction: 
We report versatile, customizable, robust, low-cost, and easily manufacturable chromatography micro-columns (μCols) made using  thermoplastic solvent bonding and used for rapid screening of therapeutic quality protein purification. We compared granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (GCSF) protein purification, expressed using a cell-free CHO in-vitro translation (IVT) system, between a conventional 1mL immobilized metal affinity chromatography (IMAC) column and the fabricated μCols ranging from 25 μL to 200 μL. Experimental data revealed comparable purity with a 10-fold reduction in the amount of buffer, resin, and purification time for the μCols, with an 80% reduction of cost. 

Objective: 
Provide an alternative and innovative solution for quick prototyping of μCols for process development and optimization for affinity-based purification.


Biography:

Erick graduated from UMBC with a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering (’18).  He worked at Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST) located in UMBC, as a Systems Design Engineer focused on the product development of microfluidic devices used for downstream processing of therapeutic proteins.

He began his career in microfluidics by working as the team leader of an undergraduate team in Dr. Govind Rao's sensors class, tasked with developing a microfluidic debubbler for his Bio-MOD project funded by DARPA. He was then offered an internship position in the systems design team of the Bio-MOD project under the mentorship of Dr. Abhay Andar, where he was tasked with optimizing and making the bioprocesses used for the G-CSF purification runs, as well as developing, manufacturing, and validating microfluidic devices for downstream processing.

Upon graduation, he was offered a full-time position as a Research Associate in the Bio-MOD project, joining for the second phase of the project in which we had to optimize our process for animal studies. We developed several microfluidic devices, such as mixers, holders, novel and fully customizable chromatography micro-columns (µcols), and multi-functional integrated chips using thermo-plastic solvent bonding methods and adhesives. Our work for "Low‐cost customizable microscale toolkit for rapid screening and purification of therapeutic proteins," was recently published. (https://doi.org/10.1002/bit.26876) We further expanded our microfluidics research by using wood instead of plastics as our primary material, which led to the publication of “Wood Microfluidics,” published in Analytical Chemistry in 2019.

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Posted: October 31, 2019, 10:55 AM

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