Welcome to the Centre for Molecular Biochemical Engineering

Molecular biochemical engineering encompasses the fields of biotechnologies and biomanufacturing, biofuels and environmental engineering as well as food industry. In addition to traditional chemical engineering approaches to manufacturing and processing in these fields, our centre focuses on molecular design and the understanding of fundamental physico-chemical, biochemical and biophysical phenomena underlying associated technologies.

This field is multidisciplinary, gathering concepts and technologies in materials science and chemistry (design of soft matter interfaces, macromolecular architectures and harnessing of self-assembly), chemical engineering (nano/micro-fabrication, membrane technologies, sensing platforms and catalysis) and biology (stem cell biology, biotherapeutics design and production, biomanufacturing).

Key societal challenges are directly addressed by the field of molecular biochemical engineering, including the tackling of infectious diseases and the rapid response to a pandemic (development of biotherapeutics, biosensing/testing and scale up of biomanufacturing), the improvement of healthy ageing in our population (scale up and parallelisation of stem cell manufacturing, biotherapeutics), and the achievement of environmental targets to tackle global warming and plastics pollution (biofuels, degradable and biosourced plastics, sensing, biomass degradation and reprocessing).

Our vision is that molecular biochemical engineering will play an increasing role in the UK response to key societal challenges such as the tackling of global pandemics, enabling healthy ageing and the race against global warming. QMUL has significant expertise and unique facilities in this field, in particular in molecular design.