Downstream Processing: Primary Recovery

Andrea Rayat is an Associate Professor in Bioseparations and Downstream Processing at University College London (UCL). She holds Biochemical Engineering and Chemical Engineering degrees from UCL (PhD), TU Delft (MSc, cum laude), and UPLB (BSc). She has also trained at London Business School taking enterprise courses and MBA electives. Prior to her current post, she has had roles outside of academia as a product engineer, product manager and consultant in the biopharma industry.

Her main research aim is to contribute to the understanding of bioseparations of novel, biologically-derived products and to reveal the science and engineering that underpin recovery and purification operation, and their scale-up. Her group achieves this through the design and application of ultra scale-down and millifluidic devices, and other high throughput techniques.

Her work on ultra scale-down as applied to industrial enzyme production has been recognised by the IChemE Global Awards (2020) and by the InnovateUK KTP awards (2021). She actively engages with the scientific community and industry through research collaborations (e.g. Pall (now Cytiva), AstraZeneca, Oxford Biomedica, MHRA) and contributions to scientific meetings (Recovery XIX, ECI Integrated Continuous Biomanufacturing V, HTPD VI, 42nd ISPPP, ECI Single Use Technologies (SUT) VI and as chair in SUT VII in 2025). At UCL, Andrea is also the head of the department teaching committee and is director of the BEng/MEng Biochemical Engineering programs.

Day 1

• Introduction to Primary Recovery and Membrane Operations
• Fundamentals of Solid-Liquid (S-L) Separation: Centrifugation and Filtration
• Intracellular Product Release
• Scale-Down of S-L Operations

Day 2

• Case Study 1: Primary Recovery Operations
• Industrial Primary Recovery
• Adsorptive Depth Filtration in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing
• Impact of Conditioning on Recovery Operations: Precipitation, Crystallisation and Flocculation
• Cell Engineering to Ease Primary Recovery

Day 3

• Case Study 2: Primary Recovery Operations
• Tangential Flow Microfiltration
• Tangential Flow Ultrafiltration
• Ultra Scale-down TFF Mimics
• Spotlight Series: Specialist talk on the state of primary recovery and membrane operations

Day 4

• Simulation Case Study 3 The Role of Microfiltration in Whole Bioprocess Studies
• Rapid Evaluation of Primary Recovery Operations – Delegate Presentations
• Panel with MBI Speakers