NCTM Educating and Building a Global Bioprocessing Workforce

In a global healthcare crisis, shipping treatments around the world is not always enough. Instead, therapeutics need to be manufactured closer to the point of use, but that requires both hard and soft infrastructure.

The soft infrastructure is a trained workforce, which is crucial to successfully manufacturing vaccines and therapeutics. To support and encourage bioprocessing in more countries, the National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing (NCTM), located at the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station at College Station, started training international groups of engineers, scientists, and technicians through its Advanced Certificate in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing (ACBM) program.

As Jenny Ligon, associate director for NCTM, describes the ACBM program, it consists of “nearly 100 online and hands on training hours covering various aspects of cell culture and basic molecular biology, aseptic processes and microbiology, upstream and downstream processing of biological materials including viruses, monoclonal antibodies, and other recombinant proteins, as well as industrial bioanalytical methods.”