From Bentleys to Biology - why we need transferable skills

Rebecca Grant recently graduated from Loughborough University in Product Design Engineering completing an industrial placement year with Bentley Motors Ltd where she developed an interest in manufacturing and metrology.

I am a recent graduate, embarking on a PhD in Regenerative Medicine. My background however, is manufacturing – my degree being Product Design Engineering; a mix of mechanical, manufacturing and design engineering, focusing on the development of consumer products.

I completed an industrial placement year at Bentley Motors Ltd as a production engineer working in the woodshop, developing systems to improve efficiency and reduce costs of their abrasive processes. This opportunity really got me interested in Manufacturing and Quality Control, which I pursued through the final two years of my degree where I looked at Surface Texture Metrology and the ability to measure surfaces with white light microscopes at different angles.

So where did the Biology come into all this? Well, I had always considered taking my studies further and doing a PhD, but I wasn’t comfortable just doing one in a ‘traditional’ metrology field. This was mainly because I knew it would involve me plunging into the depths of Physics, which I’ll admit I wasn’t comfortable with or interested in doing. After some discussion with my supervisor, they suggested instead of doing a physics-based engineering PhD, why not try a biological-based one?

Truthfully, I couldn’t see the relevance at all – why would someone who has spent 5 years of their degree specializing in engineering materials and their processes, suddenly ‘drop’ all of that to go and learn about cells and the body?

And this is where I began to realise how transferable my engineering skills really were. The regenerative medicine industry is still very young and has, no pun intended, a lot of growing to do before it can commercially provide effective cell therapies to combat degenerative diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, to name a few. To provide a suitable therapy for such large numbers of people suffering with degenerative diseases is an enormous ask; the manufacturing scales alone are huge.  From a Quality Control perspective, it isn’t possible to manage manufacturing in the traditional way, due to the fact that cells are living (and dying) things; they can’t be reworked if they don’t fit the specification. Manufacturing models such as Six Sigma probably can’t be applied to this industry, making it difficult to monitor cell therapies on a small scale, let alone the factory-sized challenge.

Engineering has ISO standards, Regulations and Directives for just about everything, but I was very surprised to learn that there are no formal standards for measuring key characteristics of a cell, and certainly not in manufacturing terms. For example, variables such as temperature and pH are process related, rather than a measure of the cells themselves. Traceability too, becomes a real problem with cells being living things, and currently it’s just not possible to trace them accurately. We do have ‘gold’ standards, which are standards for cells manufactured by national institutes for comparison in the lab, but these cells are dependent on donors and have a finite shelf-life. This really made me think and I got very interested in the whole thing and I was keen to learn more about.

So how does all this relate to transferable skills? Well, with a good knowledge of metrology and quality control, I am applying my engineering skills to create a model of the Regenerative Medicine process, to ensure that before we attempt to scale-up manufacture of cell therapies, we understand what we are dealing with and how we can accurately measure and control the product. It has made me realise how ideas and knowledge in one part of the engineering world can be applied to a completely different industrial sector.

My time at Bentley gave me a real breadth of knowledge on manufacturing systems and processes and the ability to communicate with different people; whether they were on the shop floor or departmental managers.  This has helped me in the transition into my new field of study, especially when speaking to people in industry, academia, and of course clinicians and potential patients.  My degree taught me to think outside the box and consider things from all angles and different consumer, economic and environmental situations. I am pulling all of these skills together now in my PhD, so that I can contribute to building strong foundations for the regenerative medicine industry and product manufacture, which have the potential to help treat millions of people across the globe, safely and effectively.

I appreciate this is just one example of how engineering provides transferable skills, I know there are many others out there, but I feel it is important that we share these experiences within the IMechE and to other young people thinking of taking up engineering, to inspire the next generation of thinkers and to promote collaborative innovation.   I want to encourage other young engineers like myself to use their skills, to ensure they make the most of every opportunity available to them. By being able to use skills we have developed from all sorts of different activities we will be help us work towards overcoming some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Rebecca Grant recently graduated from Loughborough University in Product Design Engineering completing an industrial placement year with Bentley Motors Ltd where she developed an interest in manufacturing and metrology. Rebecca is now applying those skills to her PhD, where she is identifying metrology and control strategies for the scaled-up manufacture of stem cell and gene therapies. Rebecca is an Associate Member of the IMechE as well as being an IMechE Postgraduate Research Scholar.