Andreas Marco Fischer

1. Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an unprecedented amount of biomedical data, with thousands of research articles, clinical trials, and sequence read archives being published daily. As of January 2024, the NCBI website alone hosts 6,735,990 sequence read archive (SRA) runs, 8,668,973 nucleotide records, 9509 clinical trials, 408,876 PubMed articles, and 654,880 PubMed Central (PMC) articles related to COVID-19 and long COVID [1,2].

1. Introduction Packing problems consist in arranging several geometrical objects in a larger object referred to as a container. The objects must be allocated subject to placement conditions, i.e., without mutual overlapping (non-overlapping condition) and all objects completely inside the container (containment condition).

In recent decades, recombinant proteins have become an essential player in the pharmaceutical industry, greatly improving treatment outcomes for patients. (1) Their production typically takes place in bacterial, fungal, or animal cell factories, with one of the most resource-intensive steps being the separation of the desired protein of interest (POI) from the crude media solution.