Hello everyone, as my internship is coming to a close on the 4th April I just wanted to write a post about my experiences at JMP and the work that I’ve put together.
Firstly, I wanted to say thanks to everyone from JMP that I’ve interacted with; everyone has been extremely friendly and I’ve felt very welcomed from Day 1. A big thanks to @volker_kraft and @Phil_Kay for their guidance and supervision over the past few months and tolerating my (many) questions!
My goals
During my internship, I had been tasked with gaining familiarity with the Functional Data Explorer platform and developing value-adding case studies for demos and academic case studies, particularly in the area of biotechnology. My goals were to create valuable resources that would catch scientist's interest and help to educate them too, as well creating demonstrations and social media posts through my LinkedIn series #FunctionalBio.
Finding case studies
The biggest challenge in making the case studies was finding the data – despite the countless numbers of publications on functional data in the upstream and analytical areas of biotechnology no one published their full data set. I’ve put together a list of useful data repositories that I found (attached) to help with data searching, both university affiliated and non-affiliated.
The case studies
Over the past 3 months I’ve put together the following case studies:
HPLC Separation Functional DOE
Based on my own PhD research and experience in chromatography, this example takes the ‘typical’ method of single output measurement with HPLC (peak height, width and time) and pulls it all together into an easy-to-read profiler that improves experimental outcomes.
Bioreactor data study
Having felt the pain of running 12 plus bioreactors in one go and receiving many days-worth of readings for >10 sensors and thinking ‘How am I going to understand this?’ I was very keen to find a bioreactor dataset (using DOE) that I could demonstrate the use of FDE. This example (from The University of Edinburgh) nicely demonstrates how you can analyze all of the sensor data that you passively collect during a run and use it to understand what is a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ run. When I’ve demoed this to Upstream Scientists they always seem excited!
Cell Growth with Fit Curve
After finding this data-set in a data-repository, I set up a simple demonstration that shows how the Fit Curve platform can be used to profile cell growth. Every biologist at some point has performed a cell growth curve – by using the Fit Curve tool the analysis becomes quicker, simpler and more effective when trying to find the best conditions for your cell growth.
Academic case studies
I’ve also prepared two academic case studies covering the use of FDE for HPLC and the Fit Curve platform for analyzing cell growth – it was a great experience to prepare teaching documents and an interesting challenge in trying to keep the language inclusive and simple to aid in understanding.
Demos and Workshops - I've been fortunate enough to demo my case studies to several biotech and biopharma companies who are looking to expand their capabilities in upstream and analytical development including Croda, Astrazeneca, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Biomarin Pharmaceuticals and Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies. Learning how to demonstrate value to customers and use language that can be easily understood by everyone has been incredibly useful and I have taken these skills over into my own PhD research.
I was also involved in preparing the teaching material for the Functional Data Explorer workshop in London on 3rd March - it was great to get involved with this and help teach the FDE platform to customers!
My time at JMP has been invaluable and I’ve learnt a lot of skills that I'll take with me in my future career. I hope to continue engaging in the JMP community and promoting the software and all of its uses!
Cheers!
Ben
