Over the summers of 2019 and 2020, I spent time interning in Bend, Oregon. Reflecting on the two summer experiences, I feel I head two very unique and special internship experiences. First, I was able to gain valuable engineering experience by working as a product development intern. Second, I was able to meet both professional and personal friends from the company and the Bend area. And lastly, I was able to fully enjoy the amazing natural environment of Central Oregon and the fast-growing town of Bend. This page gives an overview of both the work I did in each company as well as the awesome fun experiences I had.
Summer 2019
Interning at Lonza
I spent this summer interning at Lonza Pharma & Biotech as a early phase product development intern. I initially found the opportunity through meeting my eventual manager at the 2018 AIChE conference in Pittsburgh. The Lonza Bend site was formerly called Bend Research, a company started by local scientists and engineers that eventually developed proprietary technology that allowed them to grow before eventually being acquired by Lonza. The primary piece of technology that the company uses is spray drying for improving the bioavailability of drugs.
Drugs that are insoluble in water often present significant formulation issues because they aren’t able to absorb into the bloodstream if they are administered orally. Spray drying a solution of drug and polymer in a suitable solvent results in an amorphous spray dried dispersion (SDD), which has higher solubility than the crystalline drug, resulting in higher bioavailability. The Lonza Bend site primarily takes poorly soluble compounds from other companies and uses either spray drying or other methods such as extrusion, micronization, or nano-milling to improve the bioavailability.
As an intern, I worked on various internal projects as well as one client project. The main project I worked on was related to developing pressure-flow curves of large scale spray drying nozzles. The flow rate of a particular nozzle used for spray drying will affect the particle size of the resulting SDD, so my work in this area will eventually go into process development of large scale pharmaceutical spray dryers. One side project I worked on was looking at laser diffraction particle size measurements and the influence of refractive index. Since the refractive index of our SDDs are not known, I investigated suitable ranges of “guessing” refractive indices to enter into the Malvern Mastersizer 3000 instrument. I found that for large particles, there was a large range of refractive indices that would result in essentially the same particle size output. However, for small, inhalation grade particles, I found that small changes in refractive index significantly changed the particle size output. I then developed a procedure for determining the refractive index of SDDs using polarized light microscopy, which would allow us to then effectively determine the particle size. Finally, a client project I worked on was characterizing glycoconjugate purification membranes. I performed various experiments that allowed us to quantify physical parameters of the membrane that would eventually go into a model that predicts membrane fouling. I used techniques such as helium pycnometry, pressure/flow experiments, and NMR cryoporometry to gather information about membrane porosity, tortuosity, and pore size distribution.
Additionally, I took an informal seminar course taught my an employee at Lonza that taught me how drugs are developed from concept to development to clinical trials. This informal course, along with principles I learned with my work, became the influence for an honors option paper I wrote on bioavailability enhancement in a drug delivery class I later took at school.
Outside of Work
Lonza and the town of Bend provided a wealth of outside of work activities throughout the entire summer. One of the most fun things I did was play on the company kickball team. Every week after work, we had a game against another team in a local rec league.
Additionally, I got to enjoy the outdoors through hiking, camping, biking, and water activities. Check out some awesome pictures and videos from the summer!
Summer 2020
Interning at Serán Bioscience
In Fall 2019, I accepted a summer internship offer at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, NY in the Preclinical Manufacturing and Process Development (PMPD) group. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the internship was cancelled. Fortunately, my former manager at Lonza, who had since moved to a startup company called Serán Bioscience as the Director of Process Engineering, was able to pull some strings to bring me in as an intern there.
I was absolutely thrilled to return to Bend and join Serán as a R&D Intern. Serán did very similar work to Lonza as a contract manufacturing company. Their client base, however, consisted of mostly smaller companies with 1 or 2 molecules. Serán was able to remain open during the pandemic by splitting its 40 employees into two shifts. I was lucky enough to be assigned the morning shift of 6AM – 2PM. Despite the early mornings, I had my afternoons free to explore the area.
At work, I was immediately tasked with several critical projects. My main project was associated with a client looking to improve the physical stability of their small molecule drug through spray drying. I took main control of developing a scalable and practical process to perform the final API synthesis step, purify the API, and spray dry it effectively without damaging process equipment. By the end of the summer, we were able to effectively manufacture a pilot batch of the final drug formulation at high yield that the client would eventually use for pharmacokinetic studies.
I also worked on several small side projects. One of the larger side projects was working with our equipment contractor to design a shell and tube condenser for a large scale recycle spray dryer. This condenser would remove solvent vapor from the exiting gas of the spray dryer and recycle the dry gas back into spray drying chamber. I had to design the condenser to handle the heat load associated with condensing most if not all of the vapor while being constrained to a certain height, length, and gas side pressure drop. This project was a great test of classical heat transfer skills!
Finally, through working on various other client projects, I gained exposure to a variety of analytical equipment, including, in no particular order:
- Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC)
- High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), with Charged Aerosol Detection (CAD)
- Polarized Light Microscopy (PLM)
- Powder X-Ray Diffraction (PXRD)
- Particle Size Light Scattering (dry cell and liquid cell)
Additionally, I was exposed to various manufacturing areas, including:
- Small, medium, and large scale (GMP) spray dryers
- Jet mills
- Processing in GMP clean space
Outside of Work
I had another eventful summer outside of work, as most of the activities available in Bend were outdoors and not limited by COVID-19 restrictions. Check it out!
Golf
With all of the free time, I got into golfing. My housemate as well as several coworkers were kind enough to accompany me to several golf courses around town and give me tips. I improved immensely and am glad to say that I added another passion!
Exploring Bend and the Surrounding Area
On the weekends, I got to further explore Bend and the surrounding wilderness. Although I got to see even more, I still feel like there was more to cross off my bucket list!
South Sister Hike
This one deserves its own gallery. South Sister is the highest mountain in the Bend area and the 3rd highest peak in Oregon. We woke up at 4 AM on a Saturday morning and took 5 hours to reach the peak. It was easily the hardest and longest hike I have ever done, but we were rewarded with incredible views along the trail and at the summit.
