Gamification of Pharmaceutical Process Engineering: Undergraduate Academic Training for the Purification of Biologics Using Head-Mounted Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) provides the opportunity to deepen learning and experience learning situations in higher education that were previously inaccessible. Knowledge from theoretical classroom lectures is connected to scenarios from industrial practice and is thus experienced, consolidated, and anchored. VR allows students to immerse themselves in environments unattainable by university facilities, due to their temporal and spatial dimensions. The VR undergraduate academic training presented allows students to experience both an industrial scale and the regulations under which the production of biopharmaceutics is run, such as “Good Manufacturing Practice” (GMP) and safety regulations. A safety training on the virtual model of real laboratories—comprising six accident scenarios—continues in an environment based on reality with GMP-compliant dressing, a routine in the pharmaceutical industry usually not practised at universities. Main mental effort is afforded for the design of a purification process for one out of three biologics, using given parameter dependencies. After completion, students enter a large-scale downstream facility where they carry out their developed purification process. Students operate lifelike, large-scale devices rarely available at universities. Biologics are modern drugs, often produced in standardized so-called platform processes at large scale. Here, three classes of molecules, monoclonal antibody (mAb), fragment of an antibody (fab), and plasmid DNA (pDNA), are modeled. The task and challenge are to purify one of them according to product quality attributes such as yield, product concentration, and/or impurity levels. Calculations required for this run in the background of the program and are based on empirical experience and literature.