The Laboratory

Biotechnology has been recognized as one of the key areas of industrial development for the coming decades in areas as diverse as chemistry, materials science, diagnostics, environmental remediation and drug development. Many modern drugs are based on biological macromolecules (antibodies, insulin) or natural products (beta-lactam antibiotics) obtained from cells, or they are synthesized effectively with the help of enzymes obtained from microorganisms. Alternatively, cells can become the medicine itself or help to clean up the environment.

In a way, Biotechnology is about encoding and reading out information and then using it for doing useful things. We have learnt over the last decade how to synthesize and assemble anything from an oligonucleotide to an entire genome of more than a million base pairs, and we are getting increasingly adept at reprogramming cells to translate this code into the execution of synthetic functions.  This opens the door to a huge variety of processes that cells might carry out for us in the future.

At the Bioprocess Laboratory, we develop novel micro- and macroscale processes for the life science industries. Broadly, our ideas revolve around how to make small and large molecules for fine chemical and pharmaceutical purposes. For this, we apply

• advanced genetic engineering methods to rationally or randomly engineer cells and biomolecules,
  
• high throughput analytics to accelerate the engineering and discovery process and
  
• process tools to use our advanced cells and enzymes.
  

If you want to find out more about the types of projects that we do, please click here. Alternatively, look here for the joint projects in which we are involved.