About

The Centre for Translational Protein Design brings together DTU’s world-class expertise in de novo protein design, AI-guided engineering, display technologies, and high-throughput functional screening. By uniting these strengths, the Centre advances research and education that will position protein design as a cornerstone of Denmark’s future sustainable bioeconomy.

AI-generated protein illustration

Background and Motivation

Proteins underpin essential solutions across health, industry, and environmental applications. Yet many existing protein-based technologies rely on resource-intensive production methods, animal-derived components, or processes that are difficult to scale sustainably.

The Centre for Translational Protein Design aims to change this by designing programmable, ethical, and efficient proteins that address some of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges and deliver real-world impact.

Mission

Our mission is to develop proteins that enable circular processes, greener manufacturing pathways, and ethical biotech alternatives, helping accelerate the transition to a more sustainable, resilient society.

Long term goals

We aim to make protein design a foundation of Denmark’s sustainable bioeconomy by:

  1. Enabling decarbonisation through next-generation green enzymatic processes
  2. Advancing circularity via biomolecule-driven material recovery and reuse
  3. Developing ethical, scalable biotechnology that replaces resource-heavy or animal-derived solutions
  4. Building cutting-edge research infrastructure and talent pipelines for the next generation of protein engineers

Collaboration

The centre is a cross-departmental platform hosted at DTU Bioengineering built around shared goals, and a collaborative infrastructure:

  • DTU Bioengineering
  • DTU Biosustain 
  • DTU Health Tech
  • DALSA

The centre is hosted at DTU Bioengineering.