About us
The aim of The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability is to develop new knowledge and technologies to support the transformation from conventional, and often unsustainable, industrial production methods to a sustainable bio-based industry.
In this bio-based industry, chemicals and other products are produced using microbial production hosts – cell factories. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability has existed for almost a decade and was at its conception the world’s first interdisciplinary research centre within sustainability. Our research contributes to developing sustainable products within 3 categories: Sustainable Chemicals, Natural Products and Microbial Food. By developing and using a range of specialist techniques involving high-quality big data generation and analysis, synthetic biology, machine learning and AI, as well as metabolic modelling and engineering, the Center identifies how to design the next generation of cell factories. We do this with “the end in mind,” meaning that we have a commercial and industrial approach in order to take products to market faster for the benefit of consumers.The Center also focuses on educating the next generations of young scientists within the cross-field of biotechnology and data science, in order to contribute to the Danish biotech-ecosystem with highly skilled scientists and future leaders.
We engineer. For you and me. And for a sustainable world. This video takes you on a tour, giving you examples of our scientific work and focus areas
Cell factories can be engineered to produce valuable ingredients for food, feed, medicine, commodity products, chemicals and much more
Excellent science requires dedicated people
DTU Biosustain in numbers
Our headquarters are located at DTU in Lyngby, Denmark. Our international teams of scientists work our of universities all over the world - University of California, San Diego (UCSD), USA; UC Berkeley California, USA; Chalmers University, Sweden; KTH, Sweden; South Korea; and University of Queensland, Australia. We are around 300 staff members in Denmark. Additionally, we have approx. 70 staff members working out of offices outside of Denmark. The Center is part of a cluster of Novo Nordisk Foundation Research Centers that aim to attract the world's best researchers, thereby creating an internationally oriented and innovative research environment.