The biopharmaceutical industry in North Carolina has been growing rapidly, especially following the relocation of several large biopharmaceutical companies to the state, and this increase spurred the establishment of the bioprocessing degree last spring.

Now, developers of the program are hoping to attract more students to it.

According to statistics from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, there are 20,000 North Carolinians working as biotechnologists in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries with more than 2,500 new positions being added every year.

The prevalence of the industry within North Carolina has led the Department of Food Science to begin offering a new curriculum in bioprocessing science, which received approval to begin accepting students in the Fall 2006 semester.

Chris Daubert, an associate professor in the Department of Food Science who oversaw the development of the new degree program, said now that the long process of getting the program approved is completed, the program’s next challenge will be catching the interest of students.

“Right now, our main focus is on trying to market the degree and get students interested,” Daubert said. “We want them to know that getting this degree is a great way to get a high-paying job while not having to leave North Carolina.”

Daubert said having many N.C. State alumni already working in the industry was important to the curriculum’s inception.

“The degree program first came about three or four years ago,” Daubert said. “We were interested in responding to a need from the state to train and educate scientists for the biopharmaceutical industry. We assembled a task force of alumni who were working in the industry. We had them come back to the department, and they recommended the development of the degree program.”

Bioprocessing is a term that includes the research, development, manufacturing and commercialization of products prepared or that biological systems use. This includes food, feed, biopharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

According to Daubert, students in the new curriculum all begin their work by taking Introduction to Biopharmaceutical Science, but will also be required to complete courses in microbiology, chemistry, engineering and design. The wide variety of courses required to complete the degree was one of the reasons the curriculum was so challenging to develop, according to Daubert.

“It was a lengthy process to get this new degree program established,” Daubert said. “We first had to get approval within our own department, and then we had to get approval from some of the other departments that students would be taking courses in.”

Daubert also said the program had to show that the resources available to the program, such as professors and lab equipment, was adequate before the program could be approved. This was achieved through a partnership with the Biomanufacturing Education and Training Center.

Students will have opportunities to complete coursework in the Center’s facility on Centennial Campus.

According to Donn Ward, the head of the Department of Food Science, this partnership with BTEC was influential in the development of the curriculum as well.

“We took several of the BTEC’s job categories and developed our curriculum based on these job categories that the industry needed,” Ward said.

Ward said he hoped the new program would one day be able to attract 25 to 50 new students a year, and that it would be beneficial to students and to the economy of North Carolina as well.

“Within the next five years, we hope to reach the point where we can have a steady stream of students coming in to the program and a steady stream going out as graduates,” he said. “We want to get to the point where companies will call our department looking for employees, and we will be able to set up interviews with some of our students. We want to encourage economic growth and development in North Carolina, and we want companies to offer our students lucrative jobs.”

The new program makes NCSU a pioneer in an area that Daubert said will continue to grow into the future.

“We don’t know of any programs like this one in the country right now,” Daubert said. “After we started the program, we have had several of our peer institutions contact us, wanting to come up with something similar. We are the first, but we will definitely not be the last.”