Fraunhofer Research Institution for Individualized and Cell-Based Medical EngineeringOne of the greatest tasks of our time is to meet the increasing consumption of resources by humanity through new technologies. One of the key ideas in these efforts is to increasingly realize production in cycles in the future. This requires not only the development of new renewable raw materials and the development of unifying platform technologies, but also the production itself must increasingly be carried out by "renewable factories".
Cells are just such "renewable factories". In millions of years they are optimized production sites of useful substances. These can be energy carriers, medicines or foods. The agrarian revolution, which led to the development of agriculture, had exactly the use of these metabolic performances of cells to content. The continuation of this development in the bioreactor represents a logical step. Cell culture is the continuation of agriculture with cleverer means. Agriculture has emancipated the organism from biotope; cell culture emancipates the cell from the organism. In the future, it will not only enable greater sustainability and conservation of resources, but also an ethically more acceptable production of animal and plant products.
Cell Technology contributes to this development by focusing on two main areas: the development of cell proliferation devices and technologies; and for another the development of a novel cell logistics (cell transport, cell storage, use of cell banks). The developed devices and technologies include for example a hydrogel-based bioreactor principle for the propagation of adherently growing cells, a portable incubator for cells, a holoscopic microscope for the observation of cells, software for the quantitative evaluation of cell images or time series of cell images.