Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has turned the whole world upside down. After weeks of curfew to relieve the national health care systems, the economic impact becomes more and more perceptible: We are facing a substantial crisis. The only way out of this misery is finding a) an effective drug for the treatment of COVID-19 or b) a safe vaccine, which prevents us from a Coronavirus infection.

Automation is the future of numerous processes – not only in our everyday life but also in more specialized areas such as bioprocessing. Researchers are eager to find solutions in order to replace routine steps by automated process sections. This gives them the opportunity to spend the gained time on more meaningful things: thinking about new innovations!

We are living in a throwaway society; this is also true for clothes. When we think of the personal protective equipment for work safety such as mechanically robust and fire resistant clothes, it makes sense that they also have an expiration date. But that does not mean that also the ingredients have lost their functionality. Usually, these compounds have been produced with considerable energy effort, thus, it reasonable to find an efficient recycling method.

A new development in the European framework programs for research and innovation is catching attention: the lump sum pilot. First implementations are in progress already in Horizon 2020 and intensified for the next framework program Horizon Europe. What does it mean for the research community and which changes do we expect?

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission is a massive problem for our climate; this is well-known. We urgently need measures to prevent earth from the big collapse. Where do we find them? Biotechnology offers some interesting solutions.

The modern business world is using a new buzzword: “Open innovation”. What does it mean? How “open” do we need to be? What could be the benefit? And what does it look like in reality?

More efficiency, more quality, more process safety, less costs, less waste – these are the target specifications of each and every production process in chemical industry. It seems quite ambitious to meet all these requirements, but a new key word has entered the engineering world: process intensification!

Research funding is a highly competitive process and only a small fraction of applicants get the grant in the end. EU-Horizon 2020, with almost 80 billion Euros the largest research program worldwide, has an average success rate of only 14%. What is the secret of success of those, who have made it? 

Did you know that nowadays bacteria and mammalian cells, especially hamster cells, produce a wide range of drugs? And who tells them to do so? The answer is the four-letter code of DNA. Biotechnologists spend a lot of time to explore natural DNA sequences of different organisms for production. The Chinese Hamster is a mammalian system and suits well for cell factories because of its similarity to human cells. However, for a long time the knowledge about the hamster DNA sequence had many gaps that needed to be investigated.

Sugar is not only a widely used food ingredient but can also be used as possible starting point for high-added-value products. The European research consortium of CARBAFIN explores different ways to make use of sugar beet biomass: the sugar components glucose and fructose are starting points for the production of important ingredients for not only food/feed but also cosmetics. Besides, fructose can be further converted to a platform chemical, which is applied to the production of bioplastics, biofuels or biopolymers, as well as resins. In other words, CARBAFIN people sweeten our lives!