https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/nitin-vashisht/week-01-hw-project-ideas/index.htmlHTBAA Homework #1: Automated Biomanufacturing as a Discovery Engine for Biosensors Course: How to Biomanufacture (Almost) Anything 2026 Assignment: Homework #1 — Biomanufacturing Proposal Due: Tuesday, September 22 1. What I Want to Biomanufacture, and Why Most biosensor development treats “biomanufacturing” as the last step of the pipeline: once a laboratory has identified a promising aptamer or engineered protein switch, that molecule is scaled up and produced. My proposal inverts that relationship. I want to biomanufacture the biosensors themselves, but as the output of a closed, automated discovery loop in which biomanufacturing infrastructure is also the instrument that generates the data used to train and continually fine-tune the computational model that designs the sensors. In other words, the “product” is twofold: (i) a validated family of nucleic-acid (aptamer) and protein-based biosensors for a target class of analytes, and (ii) a progressively improving, experimentally grounded design model — a lab-in-the-loop system — that gets better at proposing new sensors with each iteration.Hugoen