Sami Ur Rehman — HTBAA Fall 2026

About me

I’m a final-year BS Biotechnology student at Virtual University of Pakistan, based in a small village in district Attock.

My wet lab background comes from my final-year research project on the domestic yaks from northern Pakistan — DNA extraction from whole blood, NanoDrop quantification, PCR, and gel electrophoresis. Alongside that I am learning bioinformatics, AI-assisted protein structure prediction, and computational design of therapeutics.

I also serve as Outreach Committee Lead for RSG Pakistan (Regional Student Group, ISCB) and as a Human Practices Researcher for iGEM Toronto 2026.

Why HTBAA

Most of my training has been on the design side of biology — sequences, structures, and targets. What I have never had access to is the manufacturing layer: automation, cloud labs, liquid-handling robotics, and programmable microfluidics. There is no facility in Pakistan where I can get hands on any of it.

I’m interested in a specific question this course is well placed to answer: how small a team, and how little infrastructure, does it now take to manufacture a sophisticated biological product? My focus is low-volume, high-value biologics — the regime where centralised commodity biomanufacturing economics break down and where distributed, automated production may be genuinely competitive. I want to understand where the real bottlenecks sit between designing a biological product and making it reproducibly, and what automation actually does to the cost, labour, and capital required to get there.

Contact info

• Email
• LinkedIn

Homework, Labs, and Projects

See the nav bar on the left to look through my work for How To Biomanufacture Almost Anything (Fall 2026)!