For the fifth year in a row, the lecture series “Meet the Circular Economy,” led by Prof. Dr. Sandra Venghaus, takes place at RWTH Aachen University during the 2026 summer semester. At the first session, Dr. Stefanie Eiden of Covestro and Wolfgang Köster of WEPA presented their companies’ concepts for the circular use of polymers respectively paper and pulp fibers.

Congratulations to the team of LipiTune for receiving the Warpspeed Fund from The Materials Lab Incubator with a total budget of 200,000€. The team behind LipiTune consists of four people from the RWTH Aachen: Marcel Mann, Benedikt Riedel, Paul Richter, Thomas Steimann. The project had its beginnings in the Boost Fund 2.0 project NextVegOil.

Many stimulating conversations at the Circular Valley Convention have once again shown the essential role of research and systemic knowledge for a sustainable bio-based and circular economy. With LipiTune and re.solution, two startups that originated from BioSC projects could be presented. Thank you to our conversation partners, the organizers, and to BioökonomieREVIER for setting up a joint booth!

Eight new interdisciplinary SEED FUND 3.0 projects and a White Paper have been launched around the turn of the year. Topics include the optimization of enzymes, production organisms and crops using synthetic biology and bioinformatics, the development of bio-based materials for pharmaceutical and agricultural applications, and the investigation of soil properties and quality in innovative cultivation systems.

The 9th International BioSC Symposium was held at the LVR Landesmuseum in Bonn on November 24 and 25, 2025. Around 150 participants from academia, industry, politics and civil society joined the event that focused on the connections and links between bioeconomy, circularity and sustainability in the context of global and climate change. Welcome addresses were given by Thorsten Menne from the Ministry of Culture and Science NRW and Katja Frühwald-König, Co-Chair of the Bioeconomy Council NRW. Thorsten Menne presented the BioSC Christian Patermann Award 2025 for exceptional supervision of PhD students in the field of bioeconomy to Jeanette Klink-Lehmann (University of Bonn) and Marco Löhrer (RWTH Aachen University).

John Woodley (DTU Chemical Engineering, Denmark) gave the 35th BioSC Lecture entitled “Opportunities and challenges for microbial and cell-free biocatalysis” at the Jülich Biotech Day 2025. In his presentation, John Woodley focused on biocatalysis and highlighted the differences between in vivo and in vitro reactions.