16 October, 2024
Workshop at the Research Morning (Advanced Therapies)
DYNAMIC WORKSHOP ON CLEAN ROOMS AT THE RESEARCH MORNING DURING THE EUROPEAN RESEARCH NIGHT 2024.
On Wednesday, October 2, 2024, Maria Camanyes and Natalie Chaves, researchers at Creatio, a center for the production and validation of advanced therapies at the University of Barcelona, went to the Ferran Tallada Public Institute (Barcelona) to conduct a workshop on clean rooms for the production of advanced therapies and how clean rooms work, entitled “Could you work in a clean room? The complexity of biological drugs” for professional degree students within the Research Morning 2024.
About 25 students, divided into 2 groups, participated in the workshop, which they have been introduced to clean rooms for the production of advanced therapies, how clean rooms work, the requirements that must be met to be able to work, biological drugs, and how these drugs are produced in clean rooms. This workshop has been designed with the goal that students understand that there are other drug formats apart from those widely used (such as pills, syrups, inhalers…) and that very specific conditions and specific skills are needed to be able to manufacture them.
In addition, to get more familiar the concepts and make the workshop more dynamic, the theoretical explanation was combined with a practical part in which students appreciated the complexity of working in a clean room. In this practical part, students had to simulate, by carrying out 3 different workshops, what to do before entering a clean room. In the first workshop they practised how to put on double gloves so that the outermost one remained sterile, in the next, they simulated the procedure for get dressed in the clean room clothes and, in the last, they were able to examinate how the level of contamination of the rooms is checked through the use of microorganism culture plates.
The workshop was a great success; students have shown interest and participation, and they have understood the complexity of working in clean rooms, as well as the need to make these facilities known to society. On the other hand, the researchers point out that “Although at the beginning the students commented how all this was far from them, by the end of the workshop some of them asked what course they should study in order to end up working in a cleanroom facilities. The workshop was a success for basic professional training students who fell distanced from science because of the complexity they attribute to this field.
The Morning of Research in Catalonia is an activity aimed at schools and institutes that is part of the European Night of Research, a public event dedicated to the dissemination of science that is held every year in more than 300 cities in 30 European countries at the same time. The aim of the European Night of Research is to bring research, innovation, and its protagonists closer to the public of all ages in a simple and fun way.