Our research group is investigating wholistic bioprocess development and engineering with a focus on plant molecular farming, i.e. the use of plants and plant cells to produce value-added products such as small molecule drugs and recombinant proteins.

Specifically, we perform

  • Rational gene and protein design to improve food supplement, enzyme and therapeutic manufacturability
  • Development of plants and plant cell cultures, to produce challenging and innovative products such as recombinant immunetoxins
  • Bioprocess integration of upstream production, downstream processing and data analysis
  • Cascading biomass utilization of waste and side streams for a sustainable integrated bio-economy
  • Process modelling of expression and separation of products and host cell proteins using data-driven, mechanistic and hybrid models
  • Process digitalization for model predictive control in bioengineering
  • High-throughput screening and optimization for bio-transformation

Our research is embedded into joined activities with partners from academia and industry with whom we translate products and processes from bench to scalable, cost-efficient applications.