Fraunhofer IME at the Plant Cell Summit 2026

The Plant Cell Summit 2026, organised by the Plant Cell Institute, brought together international experts from academia, industry and regulatory authorities in Oxford on 29–30 September. The central question was how plant cell cultures can be developed into a robust and economically viable platform for industrial production. Dr. Henrik Nausch from Fraunhofer IME delivered a keynote on "Data- and model-driven bioprocess design".

A central focus of his presentation was the scale-up gap between laboratory development and industrial production – the transition from "Lab to Fab". Using plant suspension cell cultures as an example, he explained how mechanistic and data-driven models can improve process understanding, support more informed development decisions and facilitate the transfer to larger production scales. Model-based approaches can thus help reduce development time and costs while limiting scale-up risks. The keynote thereby addressed a key challenge in technology transfer, which is also reflected in Germany's High-Tech Agenda.