At the highly esteemed Cell Culture Engineering Conference, three out of eight poster awards were given to staff members from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability (CFB). Furthermore, the industry showed quite an interest in the Center.
At The Cell Culture Engineering Conference that took place in May 2016, eight posters were awarded. Out of this, students and postdocs from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability (CFB) won three in a strong competition of approximately 200 posters.
The winners were PhD student Daniel Ley, Postdoc Jae Seong Lee, and PhD Student Shangzhong Li, who all won for either best poster content or best poster presentation.
Great interest from the industry
Assistant Professor and Co-PI Nathan E. Lewis from CFB's international section at University of California San Diego was also present and noticed the great interest in the research center:
“My experience was, that the audience was very interested in our talks, and that the CFB really got a lot of positive attention,” he says and continues:
"Many people from the industry said that our work is quite excellent and that our groups are leaders in the field"
Assistant Professor and Co-PI Nathan E. Lewis, CFB at University of California San Diego
“Many people from the industry said that our work is quite excellent and that our groups are leaders in the field. Others told me, that they would definitely keep their eyes on us in the future.”
Nathan E. Lewis headed a part of a workshop on genome editing in the development of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines at the conference.
CFB also gave three talks
This time, the Cell Culture Engineering Conference focused on development of mammalian cell lines and bioprocessing. This includes how to use and enhance CHO cells in a bioreactor environment to maximize productivity.
In doing this, it is important to know how to engineer the animal cells in order for them to produce valuable bio-pharmaceuticals.
Furthermore, Scientific Director Gyun Min Lee, Assistant Professor and Co-Pi Nathan E. Lewis and Senior Researcher and Co-PI Helene Faustrup Kildegaard from the Center were selected to give talks at the conference.
The organizers also selected PhD Hooman Hefzi and Jae Seong Lee to give so-called lightning talks (10 speakers were selected out of the 200 posters).
Increasing interest in cell factory design
Until now, researchers from CFB have been asked to do more than 20 talks from April to October 2016 at large international conferences.
“In my opinion, it is an indication of the increasing interest in cell factories and design of production cell lines,” says CEO Bernhard Palsson from the CFB.
He recently gave a key note talk called “using analysis of metabolic dynamics as a systems biology approach to CHO cell enhancement in bioprocessing” at the Cell Culture World Congress in San Diego.
Cell Culture Engineering Conference only occurs every second year, and is by invitation only.
It is limited to about 400 attendees and of these, approximately 25 pct. come from academia, and 75 pct. come from the industry.
Nine CFB staff members both from sections located at University of California San Diego and Technical University of Denmark received an invitation.
This time the conference was held in May 2016 in sunny and hot California.