https://pages.htgaa.org/2026b/prisha-gupta/week-01-hw-project-ideas/index.htmlProduct Target and Motivation Target Product: Thermally stable recombinant “mini-collagen”. Motivation: Chronic non-healing wounds, such as severe burns and ulcers, present major burdens in the global clinical world. Problem: While animal-extracted collagen provides the structural scaffold necessary for tissue repair, there are risks of batch-to-batch inconsistency, immune rejection, and pathogen transmission. While recombinant human collagen resolves the safety concerns, it denatures at body temperatures(98.6°F- 104°F) and is degraded by elevated protease levels in the chronic wound beds, rendering the scaffold useless. Additionally, natural collagen relies on a host prolyl 4-hydroxylase (P4H) enzyme to modify prolines and stabilize the triple helix. Because standard industrial host cells like E. coli lack P4H, scientists are required to co-express this mutli-subunit human enzyme, which severely reduces production yields and increases manufacturing complexity.Hugoen