A New Format for the Department
On 7 May 2025, the Department of Chemical and Biological Process Engineering (CBI) at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg hosted its very first „CBI meets Start-up“ event — a new platform designed to bridge the gap between academic research and entrepreneurship. The event brought together four innovative start-up companies with students, researchers, and faculty, giving founders the opportunity to present their business concepts, share their founding stories, and offer concrete employment and collaboration opportunities. The format sent a clear message: a successful and meaningful career in engineering and the life sciences does not have to follow the traditional academic path — it can also mean joining a young company or taking the leap to found one’s own.
Prior to the start-up presentations, institutes from within the department were invited to participate in an accompanying poster market, where they could advertise graduation topics, explore potential university-wide collaborations, and engage in open scientific discussions with students and colleagues alike.
Our Institute at the Poster Market
The Institute of Medical Biotechnology was proud to be represented at this inaugural event. Our team — Jonas Thiele, Magdalena Otte, Mert Ergin, Michael Haug, and Holly Sandner — presented the institute’s current research activities and available graduation topics at the poster market. Conversations ranged from discussing open thesis positions to exploring shared scientific interests with colleagues from across the department. The event offered a valuable opportunity to raise the institute’s profile within the faculty and to connect with motivated students who are looking for research topics at the interface of biotechnology and engineering.
The poster market format proved to be an effective and low-threshold way to start conversations — for students curious about a future in bioprocess engineering as much as for colleagues seeking synergies across research groups.
The Start-up Companies
Four carefully selected start-ups presented at the event, each working on a technology with significant implications for sustainability, health, and industry.
Orcan Energy – Turning Waste Heat into Clean Electricity
Orcan Energy is a Munich-based cleantech company founded in 2008 by three researchers — Richard Aumann, Andreas Sichert, and Andreas Schuster — as a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The company was created within a government-supported programme for university-based business start-ups, and the founders had spent years at TUM’s Chair of Energy Systems developing compact, cost-efficient Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) technology before launching their company.
The core idea behind Orcan’s technology is deceptively simple: industrial processes, engines, ships, and biogas plants all produce large amounts of waste heat that is typically lost to the environment. Orcan’s modular „efficiency PACKs“ — containerised ORC power plants — capture this heat and convert it into clean electricity, using an organic working fluid instead of water in a process analogous to a steam engine. The key innovation was to standardise and miniaturise the ORC process, which had previously only been economically viable at large scales, making it accessible to a wide range of small and medium-sized applications. The result is a plug-and-play system that can be integrated into existing steam or thermal oil circuits or directly into exhaust gas streams, generating up to 25 kW of electrical power per module. With 20 patents behind their technology and installations across multiple European countries, Orcan demonstrates how academic research can evolve into a commercially successful climate technology.
DACworx – Scalable Direct Air Capture of CO₂
DACworx Engineering GmbH is a Vienna-based start-up officially founded in 2024, co-founded by Dr. Gerhard Schöny and Dr. Johannes Fuchs, both with deep roots in chemical engineering research at TU Wien. Schöny spent years as a senior researcher at TU Wien’s Institute of Chemical Engineering, where he worked on carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) and fluidised bed process development before transitioning into industry and ultimately co-founding DACworx.
DACworx is developing innovative, energy-efficient, and scalable Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology — a process by which CO₂ is removed directly from ambient air. Unlike point-source carbon capture, DAC can be deployed anywhere in the world and can clean up both historical and hard-to-abate emissions. DACworx’s modular approach is designed for cost-efficient, high-purity CO₂ removal, making it suitable for both carbon storage (DACCS) and carbon utilisation (DACCU) applications. The company collaborated closely with TU Wien and the US-based DAClab on the construction of pilot and demonstration units in Austria. The technology drew on over a decade of academic research into fluidised bed adsorption processes, making DACworx a compelling example of a long-term research programme successfully translated into a market-ready solution.
Litherm – Zero-Emission Lime and Cement Production
Litherm Technologies GmbH was founded in 2019 by Felix Nelles, Dr. Thomas Stumpf, and Prof. Dr. Markus Goldbrunner, with the aim of decarbonising one of the most stubborn sources of industrial CO₂ emissions: the production of lime and cement. Cement and lime are essential construction and industrial materials with no viable substitutes in most applications — yet their production is responsible for approximately 8% of global CO₂ emissions.
The challenge is twofold: conventional kilns burn fossil fuels, and the calcination reaction itself — converting calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) into lime (CaO) — inherently releases CO₂ chemically bound within the limestone. Litherm’s breakthrough lies in a fully electric, fluidised-bed calcination process that eliminates all combustion-related emissions, while simultaneously isolating the unavoidable process CO₂ as a concentrated by-product, ready for CCS or CCU pathways — without requiring additional energy input for capture. This integrated approach avoids the costly end-of-pipe solutions typical of conventional carbon capture retrofits. The company recently closed a €6.5 million seed financing round to fund industrialisation and the construction of its first demonstration plants, a significant milestone that signals growing investor confidence in the technology’s commercial potential.
LumatixBio – Light-Controlled Antibody Purification
Lumatix Biotech GmbH is perhaps the start-up with the most direct relevance to the work carried out at the Institute of Medical Biotechnology. Founded in 2021 by Andreas Reichert as a spin-off from the Chair of Biochemical Engineering at TUM (Prof. Dirk Weuster-Botz), Lumatix is developing a genuinely disruptive platform for antibody purification — a process that lies at the heart of pharmaceutical biomanufacturing.
Monoclonal antibodies are one of the fastest growing drug classes, but purification remains a major cost driver, partly because conventional Protein A chromatography relies on harsh acid-based elution steps that can damage sensitive molecules. Lumatix has engineered an affinity matrix in which a proprietary molecular light switch is used to toggle the binding mode of the protein ligand on and off using light of different wavelengths — red light for capture, blue light for release. The resulting Solaris® System eliminates the need for pH shifts or chemical additives, protecting biomolecules, reducing buffer consumption, enabling faster cycle times, and ultimately lowering production costs. The technology has broad applicability across Protein A, G, and L affinity ligands, making it relevant for a wide spectrum of antibody-based products. Lumatix was supported through the EXIST start-up programme and the TUM research ecosystem in Garching, and the company recently received an innovation award recognising its impact on the field.