EPSCoR experience explores and opens doors to biotech, higher education

Give high school students hands-on experiences and make their classroom learning relatable to real life, and suddenly science becomes accessible, interesting and possibly a job choice.

Granted, this is not a novel or flashy approach, but as one collaborative pilot program is proving, it is one that works.

“Kids are starting to realize it’s a viable area to go into for a career,” said Ken Kurkoski, Warwick Veterans High School science department head. “They’re seeing that they can stay in Rhode Island and be gainfully employed.”

As Kurkoski talked, a group of his students started working their way through the steps of a Biotech Crash Course in the lab of Community College of Rhode Island Assistant Professor Scott Warila.

Kurkoski partners with Warila and Tim Pelletier, outreach and education coordinator for Rhode Island NSF Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), to provide the experience for the Warwick Vets students, mostly juniors and a few seniors.

All of the students are enrolled in the school’s Biotech Academy, which Kurkoski launched nearly four years ago at the urging of Warwick Vets Principal Gerald Habershaw. The academy is a cross-curricular approach that engages English and social studies along with the science.

“The reading in English tends to focus on science — Brave New World, Frankenstein — and explores ethical dilemmas,” Kurkoski explained. “In social studies, they look at the American legal system,court cases on bioethics and other concerns in the field.”

For the crash course, Warila led the students, spread out among lab tables, through an actual biopharmaceutical manufacturing process designed for a two-hour lab, with some of the steps prepared in advance. But for the students, the experience was both new and real.

Caroline Savery, who teaches chemistry and biotechnology at Warwick Vets, worked with the students, moving from table to table and engaging with the lab partners.

From her vantage point, she said the experience held incredible value and enhanced the classroom curriculum: “They get exposure in a hands-on, direct application of the science. It gets them excited about learning.”

The purifying process

In addition to leveraging relationships to make the experience happen, Rhode Island NSF EPSCoR also provides some of the equipment and supplies that allow students to put into practice the upstream and downstream biotech processes, which normally take days, in just a few hours.

Warila explained, “Green fluorescent protein (GFP) is a great protein to use in education. The students can visually track it during the entire lab and enhance their understanding of each step of the process. The steps performed would be very similar in industry with most protein products.”

The upstream process involves transformation, where a gene of interest, in this case GFP, is inserted into a host cell (E. coli) and grown up in large quantities in cell cultures.  This creates large numbers of cells that are producing GFP, the target protein.

For the downstream process, where the product is harvested and purified, the students recovered the GFP by breaking open the cells (known as lysis) and then separating the two using a centrifuge.

Guided by Warila, the students employed column chromatography (a purifying method), which strongly binds the product to a column filled with a special resin to attract only the GFP.

The rest of the non-target proteins simply washed away, leaving the students to use a solution to pull the product back off the column in a highly purified state.

Making science real

Principal Habershaw said he saw the value of the biotech experience through the work of his wife, Dr. Beth Anne Zielinski-Habershaw, who teaches bioengineering at Brown University

“I knew from my wife that biotechnology was a fast-growing field, that jobs were going to be prevalent in the state of Rhode Island,” Habershaw said. “And, if kids needed certain skills to work in these jobs, we could give them the opportunity through a biotech academy to become employable.”

Joining forces with Pelletier and Rhode Island NSF EPSCoR, Habershaw’s vision has become a reality.

The first year, about 15 students signed up for the academy, which is designed for students in 11^th and 12^th grades. This year, there are 18 juniors alone and more than 20 students are signed up for next year. The current group of seniors is the academy’s third graduating class.

Pelletier said the Hands-on Science Experience aimed high: “We want to provide a college level program — the skills are taught by qualified staff with industry experience and use cutting edge equipment.”

Kurkoski said the program’s growth was directly related to its success. Students see the accomplishments and advances of their peers in the classes ahead of them. And, through the Rhode Island NSF EPSCoR partnership, students get a taste of opportunities in higher education along with exposure to a biotech career.

“The lab they’re doing today,” Kurkoski noted, “we don’t have the wherewithal to do in school. It’s also a great opportunity to get them in front of the type of person who is going to teach them at college. This gives them exposure to what comes after high school, whether they go onto college or a career.”

Story and photos by Amy Dunkle