News & Events

 

The biennial forum brings together world-class life science professionals and business representatives. This is where research institutions are trying to raise their profile.

 

FTMC also has a stand at the exhibition. Kasparas Kižys, a PhD student in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Technology, and his team are presenting a biocell technology under development that could revolutionize waste recycling and have applications in medicine.

 

Biocells are energy sources based on the electricity produced by bacteria. Bacteria feed on biomass - waste or sugar - and directly generate electricity that we can use. As Karolis Stašys, Innovation Manager at FTMC, says, our Center hopes to develop a new technology that will become a product - and that could replace thermal power plants using the same biomass:

 

"We see huge applications in agriculture and in wastewater management in individual homes. We hope that this technology will allow us to reuse wastewater and, if we are lucky, even use the biomass itself - it will no longer have to be burned, it will be consumed by bacteria."

 

 

 

Another area related to biocells that Kižys and his team are developing is medicine. The biocells being developed by our scientists would make artificial organs and limbs independent of external power supply.

 

How to understand this? Biocells can be integrated into the human body to use local nutrients to generate electricity to power the artificial organ. The person would feel no change, but the quality of life would be greatly improved.

 

Together with Kižys’ team, FTMC is represented at Life Sciences Baltics by two other teams presenting gluten biosensors and electroporation solutions. Electroporation is a technique that uses an electric field to introduce various other substances, such as drugs, into the cell.

 

More on this tomorrow.