Translating chemical engineering into biotech breakthroughs

In the human body, chemical engineers see a collection of chemical and physical processes. Their expertise in how to model processes is a distinguishing qualification for modeling biological systems.

“It turns out that the human body is a very complicated process system with some similarities to manufacturing plants,” says Luke Achenie (Ph.D. ’88). “The plants that produce chemicals, gasoline, and other derivatives are made up of pumps, reactors, and separation processes. In your body, the heart is a pump, the liver is like a reactor that breaks down nutrients, and the lungs separate oxygen from the air you breathe.”

Achenie, Mark Byrne, and Jordan Green are among the Carnegie Mellon chemical engineering alumni who are training future engineers and doctors with a deeper understanding of how the human body functions at the molecular scale. Through their work at academic and medical institutions, they’re advancing biomedical technology by applying core chemical engineering concepts, such as fluid and mass transfer, concentration control, and chemical reactions.

Mark Byrne 

As Senior Associate Dean and Chief Innovation Officer at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Mark Byrne (B.S. ’94) is responsible for new programs and curricula that link engineering and medicine. “We’re trying to create physicians of the future by training clinicians with engineering knowledge and training engineers to become doctors,” he says.

If a physician has an idea for a medical device, for example, Byrne wants to give them the tools to design what it will look like, determine the market, scale up manufacturing, and build a team to take it from preclinical research through regulatory approval.

Byrne has been creating new things at Rowan University since he was recruited to found their biomedical engineering department. He spent eight years building a biomedical research enterprise across the university’s three campuses and two medical schools. His next role was founding dean of the Rowan-Virtua School of Translational Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, a partnership with the Virtual Health medical system.

Byrne’s entrepreneurial zeal for innovation extends to his academic laboratories. His research in biomaterials engineering, ocular drug delivery, and controlled therapeutic delivery encompasses polymer engineering, bionanomaterials, and biomedical devices. He uses biology in the design of new materials, imitating protein structure in a polymer, for example, or engineering DNA and nucleic acids to control the release rate of a therapeutic.

Seeing a need to improve outdated and marginally effective ocular therapeutics, Byrne started a company to design ocular drug delivery systems that give people the right amount of medicine at the right place and the right time. OcuMedic, Inc. was one of the first companies to commercialize drug-releasing contact lenses for patients healing from cataract surgery, a replacement for standard-of-care antibiotic and anti-inflammatory eye drops. They also make injectable therapeutic systems.

 

Jordan Green

The molecular engineering perspective that Jordan Green (B.S. ’03) learned at Carnegie Mellon has helped him in his work with startup companies, as he navigates process development and Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls (CMC). “I think education and training at the frontiers of biology, nanoscience, and data science is incredibly exciting right now, and chemical engineering is right in the nexus of it all,” he says. 

Green is the Herschel L. Seder Professor and Vice Chair for Research and Translation in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He works with fellow faculty to learn about their technology and how to accelerate its commercialization.

In collaboration with Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, Green translates biomedical engineering advancements from his department to the world. He is also responsible for leading initiatives on new research directions and facilities.

Green researches new medicines and therapeutics. He is co-Director of the Translational ImmunoEngineering Center, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop and disseminate engineering innovations. Working in a team with engineering students, medical residents, and clinicians, Green applies chemical engineering to medical problems that he learns about from The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

He develops biotechnology such as gene therapy, immunotherapy, and nanomedicine that can engineer cells in the body to treat diseases. He was first introduced to polymeric gene delivery working with Professor Todd Przybycien and Millicent Sullivan (Ph.D. ’03) for his CMU College of Engineering undergraduate honors research.

“Now, twenty years later, I work with twenty scientists and engineers in my own lab, advancing the next-generation of these ideas to be able to safely, effectively, and specifically tune the gene expression of target cells in the body for healing,” he says.

 

Luke Achenie

A pioneer in molecular design, Luke Achenie (Ph.D. ’88) joined the Digital Twins for Health Consortium to work on a digital twin of a human system, such as an organ or biological cells. Enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence, the digital twin will have a constant exchange of information with the real system in a human.

“Imagine that before your physician recommends a lifestyle change or a new drug therapy for you, they could try it on your digital twin,” says Achenie. “This utopia does not exist yet, but research is moving in that direction.”

Achenie is a ​​Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Professor of Health Sciences at Virginia Tech. At its core, his research is about simulating molecules and how they interact with each other. Drug delivery is one area of focus. “A good drug delivery model allows for personalized care,” he says.

Achenie models how a drug is transported within the human body. He also models pharmacokinetics, or how the body tries to break down a drug, and pharmacodynamics, or what the surviving drug does to the body (for example, to the kidney).

Achenie’s molecular modeling work requires a solid understanding of chemical engineering fundamentals: transport, kinetics, thermodynamics, advanced mathematics, and physics. The applications extend beyond medicine and include membrane separation of mixtures of gases and the discovery of biologically-based surfactants, molecules that decrease the surface tension between two liquids and are commonly thought of as detergent ingredients.

He is also interested in agent-based multi-scale modeling. Achenie uses large language models such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, co-Pilot, and Gemini as a component of his modeling efforts.

To remove boundaries between fields, Achenie needed the confidence to question results and revise accepted facts. “I learned that at CMU. It’s where I matured as a researcher,” he says.

 

For media inquiries, please contact Lisa Kulick, lkulick@andrew.cmu.edu.