CD Laboratory for Mechanistic and Physiological Methods for Improved Bioprocesses

Living cells and their metabolic processes are used in the manufacture of some pharmaceutical products, for example enzymes or antibodies. The aim of research is to gain a better understanding of these processes in order to make them easier to utilise industrially.

Physiological processes and their interactions with the environment are complex - even in simple organisms such as bacteria or yeasts. Experimental studies provide a great deal of data, but little scalable and transferable knowledge. Consequently, the development of new processes has so far relied on experiments with constant physiological parameters and on statistics: the most successful combination of process parameters (e.g. temperature, food offer, ...) is determined and further developed into new processes. However, without a detailed understanding of the physiological processes, there can be unpleasant surprises if the new method is then to be applied on an industrial scale.

This laboratory is looking for methods to design processes in such a way that they can be easily scaled up and new strains can be easily integrated into the production process. The aim is to systematically identify process-relevant information and visualise it in simplifying process models. In general, the methods reduce large amounts of data to information and subsequently to knowledge. This makes the transfer of methods to industrial applications much more reliable and opens up synergy effects between other products and other processes.

As a basis for this, new methods for representative biomass measurement in real time, for determining scalable physiological parameters in dynamic process conditions and for new parallel technologies on a very small scale to accelerate process development are being developed. Subsequently, the focus will be on integrated process development and the control of bioprocesses.

The knowledge gained in this way is to be applied to a wide range of areas of biotechnology in order to demonstrate the generic applicability of the methods. Work is being carried out with bacteria, yeasts and fungi that produce enzymes, antibody fragments and secondary metabolites, but also with mammalian cells that produce complex therapeutic proteins, for example for cancer treatment.