Team

Astrid Dürauer studied Food and Biotechnology at BOKU University. After finishing her PhD and a one year-stay in Canada, she returned to Prof. Alois Jungbauer’s research team as PostDoc, where she gained experience in downstream processing of E.coli and mammalian cell derived proteins. In 2016 she was guest scientist and lecturer at the University College London, in 2019 she received her Venia Docendi in the field of Bioprocess Engineering. Since 2021 she is coordinator of the BOKU DocSchool Bioprocess Engineering and deputy head of the Institute of Bioprocess Science and Engineering (IBSE), since 2023 also of the Department of Biotechnology. The research focus of her team is miniaturized and integrated process development and model based process monitoring.

Since 2017, Petra Polak supports the Institute of Bioprocess Science and Engineering IBSE as an administrative assistant. She is responsible for the administration and financial accounting of third-party funded projects. Currently, she is administrative support in the CD Laboratory. Petra has been administriative support for the former CD Laboratory for Production of next-level biopharmaceuticals in E.coli at IBSE and therefore has a lot of valuable experience for this task.

The research of Nicole Borth from the Institute of Animal Cell Technology and Systems Biology, BOKU University Vienna, aims at obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the molecular machinery that enables mammalian cells to be good production factories for biotherapeutic proteins using methods such as genomics, transcriptomics, flow cytometry / cell sorting and computational biology. This includes factors that contribute to high yield based on productivity and growth, but also to protein quality attributes. Nicole is one of the chairs of CHOgenome, a non-profit organization that makes genome scale information for CHO cells publicly available. As of 2022, she is also the chair of ESACT, the European Society of Animal Cell Technology. In the CD Lab Nicole is mostly supervising the research focussing on understanding the cellular limitations during rAAV production in mammalian cell cultivation by genome scale analysis.

Reingard Grabherr has studied Food and Biotechnology at BOKU University and after finishing her PhD at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, she started at the Institute of Applied Microbiology at BOKU University as a PostDoc in 1992. 2002 she finished her habilitation in Applied Virology and since 2017 she is full Professor for Molecular Biotechnology at the Department of Biotechnology, since 2022 Head of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology. Her main expertise lies in applied virology, viral vector design, and the production of virus like particles in mammalian and insect cells. In the past she and her team have designed various enveloped virus like particles to be tested as vaccine candidates. In close collaboration with the Institute of Bioprocess Science and Engineering they have developed optimization strategies for the production of virus like particles including molecular design, large scale production and downstream processing. In the CD Lab Reingard is mostly supervising the research investigating strategies to establish stable cell lines for the AAV production.

Patricia Pereira Aguilar, PhD is a Senior Scientist at the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology (acib GmbH) and integrated in the Institute of Bioprocess Science and Engineering at the BOKU University. In 2020, she completed her PhD degree in “Biomolecular Technology of Proteins” (BioTop) at BOKU, under the supervision of Professor Alois Jungbauer. After that she started working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at acib and since January 2024 as a Senior Scientist and Research Group Lead. Her research focuses on the development of downstream processes and analytical tools for bionanoparticles for vaccine and gene therapy applications, such as virus-like particles, viruses and extracellular vesicles. She is joining the CD lab as an expert on downstream processes and analytical tools for bionanoparticles.

Theresa Scharl has a background in Applied Mathematics and did her PhD on the “Analysis of Gene Expression Time-Course Data Using Cluster Techniques” jointly within the Austrian Center of Biopharmaceutical Technology (ACBT), BOKU University and the Vienna University of Technology. After several years as a post-doc within the Austrian Center of Industrial Biotechnology (acib GmbH) she is now a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Statistics at BOKU University. Her main areas of research are statistical computing with R, statistical learning methods, cluster analysis, visualization, modeling of upstream and downstream bioprocesses and gene expression data analysis. She is joining the CD Lab as a Data Science expert.

Peter Satzer has made his PhD in BioTop jointly at the BOKU University and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, California. He is head of the research group “Bioprocesses for advanced medicines” at BOKU and worked on batch and continuous manufacturing of large biologics, including antibodies, viruses and virus like particles with a focus on transfection and infection processes. His work expanded into sustainability modelling and 3D printing as a rapid prototyping tool for bioprocessing applications and he recently co-founded a company researching AI driven scalable 3D printed laboratory reactors. He is joining the CD Lab as an Upstream process expert for mammalien cell cultivation and transient transfection.