Molecular Life and Health

Molecular Life and Health has several chemical- , cellular- and pharmaceutical engineering aspects and enables understanding of the interaction between the fundamentals of cells and molecules and engineering to result in (novel) applications in Health, Agri/Food, Chemistry, Materials and the Biobased Economy.

The theme aims to tackle the antimicrobial challenge and to open avenues to expand to even more complex engineering challenges such as establishing synthetic cell systems for drug delivery or reliable drug testing, thus overcoming the use of animal models.

Chemical engineering research is devoted to understand micro- and nanofluidic systems and processes and how they can be applied to biological, medical and pharmaceutical questions involving the study of cells or tissue. Another strong engineering aspect is the research on formulations for dry powder inhalers and methods to produce these for several drug substances with different physico-chemical properties. Engineering efforts within this theme will also be on bio-engineering: from designing novel pathways and compounds to metabolic- and cell-engineering to achieve optimized pharmaceutical production.