Today, essential commodities are manufactured from chemical materials based on fossil resources like oil and gas or extracted from plants and animals. This way of manufacturing depletes natural resources and increases carbon emissions.

Meeting a growing population’s needs for chemicals, polymers, materials, energy and food, calls for new bio-based industries and changing old industries’ petroleum-dependent technologies. This requires world-class scientific research and facilities, that use a range of techniques like high-quality big data generation and analysis, synthetic biology, precision fermentation, machine learning and AI, as well as metabolic modelling and engineering.

As the first interdisciplinary research centre in sustainability, The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability (DTU Biosustain) was initially founded to strengthen Denmark’s position within advanced bioprocessing and bioengineering.

Today the centre is a global leader in the field of biosolutions with an international team of top scientists working towards establishing a biobased economy, the green transition and specialising in creating biotechnological routes for product development.

DTU Biosustain specialises in using biotechnological routes for product development with the “end-in-mind”. That means listening and having a commercial and industrial approach that takes products to market faster and more effectively. Continuously engaging in dialogue with the industry, the centre works mindful of both the needs of market, society and environment. DTU Biosustain directly enables the transition from conventional, unsustainable, industrial production methods and products into a more sustainable industry based on a microbial cell factory design.