Alan Hunter, a 2002 chemical engineering Ph.D. graduate who studied with Lawrence R. Quarles Professor Giorgio Carta at the University of Virginia, will represent AstraZeneca as the recipient of the 2020 Division of Biochemical Technology of the American Chemical Society (known as ACS BIOT) Industrial Biotechnology Award at the division's 2020 meeting in Philadelphia. The award honors AstraZeneca's Lumoxiti process chemistry, manufacturing and controls team, led by Hunter, for its development and scale up of the process used to produce Lumoxiti, an important new biologic cancer drug. Another Carta lab Ph.D. graduate, Timothy Pabst, was also a member of AstraZeneca's award-winning team.
As a student and member of Carta's bioseparations engineering lab, Hunter studied process chromatography and protein mass transport. He has worked in the biopharmaceutical industry for more than 15 years, beginning his career in 2004 at Pfizer in the global biologics group. In 2009, he moved to AstraZeneca, where he is director of the biopharmaceutical development purification process sciences group.
Hunter stays involved with the department. He gives an annual lecture on regulatory aspects of biopharmaceutical manufacturing in Carta's CHE4448 Bioseparation Engineering course. In 2019, he was the keynote speaker at the inaugural CHEERS, the Chemical Engineering Research Symposium.
Carta said Hunter and Pabst collaborate with his lab on research aimed at better understanding and improving biopharmaceutical manufacturing and have published a number of joint papers.