Presse-Information

Industrial Bioprocessing Award for two young Scientists

Dr. Maike Kuschel, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma, and Dr.-Ing. Hans-Jürgen Heidebrecht, Technical University of Munich, were awarded the Industrial Bioprecess Award for their doctoral theses. The award ceremony took place during the annual Himmfelfahrtstagung on May 10, the most important meeting for bioprocess and biochemical engineers in Germany.

The award 2020 went to Hans-Jürgen Heidebrecht. He developed a processing platform for the generation of polyclonal antibodies in cow’s milk. Maike Kuschel received the Industrial Bioprocess Award 2021 in recognition of her studies on predictive modelling of bioprocess scale-up. A special focus of her work was on heterogeneities.

The Industrial Bioprocess Award is presented by the DECHEMA Working Group Bioprocess Technology. It is intended to promote young scientists whose work combines high industrial relevance and outstanding scientific quality and is endowed with 5.000 euros. It is financially supported by the industrial members of the DECHEMA Working Group.

Hans-Jürgen Heidebrecht focused his thesis on the subject „From food to medicine: Process development and use of functionalized polyclonal antibodies from cow's milk for the treatment of infections caused by multi-resistant bacteria”. The aim of this work was to develop a processing platform and to create the technological prerequisites for developing new products based on specific bovine antibodies that can be retrieved from the milk of immunized cows and used as drugs to treat bacterial infections as substitutes for non-specific antibiotics.

Hans-Jürgen Heidebrecht studied Food Technology and Biotechnology at the University of Munich / Germany and is currently working as a postdoc at the Chair of Food and Bioprocess Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, Freising / Germany.

Maike Kuschel developed in her thesis entitled “Resolving heterogeneities in single and multiphase bioreactor systems – Predictive modelling tools towards successful scale-up” supporting tools to characterise single and multiphase large scale conditions, which help to minimise the risk of suboptimal scale up. She developed a framework depicting the necessary steps to investigate large scale conditions by CFD, consisting of the characterisation of the biological system and reactor setup, multiphase and gradient simulation as well as the subsequent analysis of large scale heterogeneities.

Maike Kuschel studied technical biology and earned her doctorate in bioprocess engineering at the University of Stuttgart / Germany. She now works as scientist cell culture and bioprocess development at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG. / Germany.

Photos of the award winners

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