About Us

Biotechnology has been recognized as one of the key-areas of industrial development for the coming decades. For example, a recent study has estimated the impact of biotechnological processes in the chemical industry to increase from a current 2.5% to approximately 20% by 2010 ( >> ). The majority of the novel drugs that are currently introduced by large pharmaceutical companies or “biotech-companies” such as Genentech or Amgen are prepared entirely by processes based on biological systems or have at least a biotechnological step in their process chain. Biotechnological processes enter the pulp and paper industry, play a major role in the cosmetics industry, in flavour and fragrances, and help to clean our waste water. For the coming decades which might be characterized by an increase in oil prices and ever more pressing initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide output, biotechnology promises to be one of the potential solutions to some of the severest problems we are facing.

Biotechnology thrives on the interface of engineering and molecular life sciences. This is its characteristic feature and its raison d’etre. The biological systems we are dealing with are complex and designing them and designing the processes in which they play a kea role are some of the crucial tasks of the chemistry, health, and energy industries in this century. The BioProcessLab wants to do contribute decisive research to this quest.

We work in three areas:
a) Synthetic Biology : We work on the fundamentals of designing novel multi-enzyme reaction networks for the production of high-value-added chemicals in vivo and in vitro >>
If you want to find out more about synthetic biology, you can do that here or here .

b) Integrated Processes : We work on the design of novel bioprocess schemes for the manufacturing of novel fine chemical and pharmaceutical products. The main projects involve concepts to integrate separation and production steps to overcome problems of reaction equilibrium or product inhibition. If you want to find out more about our ideas on integrated processes, you can do that here .

c) Technology Development & Discovery: We work on a highly miniaturized and parallelized bioreactor technology that will allow the application of very high-throughput screening procedures to sampling the metagenome and tailoring enzymes for pathway design.