How do you bridge the gap between cutting-edge industrial bioprocessing and the academic world tasked with training the next generation?

This question sits at the heart of a recent episode of the Smart Biotech Scientist Podcast, where host David Brühlmann interviewed Steffen Kreye, a bioprocessing expert who transitioned from leading upstream process development at Bayer to shaping industrial biotechnology curricula at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik in Berlin.

Key Topics Discussed

• Early academic interests in mathematics, chemistry, and biology shaping the path toward biotechnology.
• Decision-making behind choosing biotechnology over other fields and comparisons with family influences.
• First real-world biotech experiences, including study abroad in Canada and work with CHO cells.
• PhD development at Glycotope with a shift from molecular biology toward process science and engineering.
• Industrial career progression from Glycotope to Bayer, including upstream development and scale-up leadership roles.
• Transition from industry to academia driven by frustration with corporate pace and discovering a university of applied sciences role.
• Teaching philosophy in applied sciences: strong lab focus, industry preparation, and reliance on external partnerships.
• Impact of AI and modern technologies on biotech education, shifting assessment toward conceptual understanding and practical skills.

Episode Highlights

• Why Steffen Kreye left a senior role at Bayer to become a professor and how his career evolved [03:54]
• The unique mission of universities of applied sciences and their close connection to industry needs [11:16]
• Challenges of delivering lab-based education, including funding and equipment constraints [12:32]
• Creative strategies for partnering with biotech companies to sustain practical lab courses [14:34]
• How reading student theses, partnerships, and conferences help Steffen Kreye and his colleagues stay current in a rapidly changing field [17:43]
• The impact of AI and digital tools on research, teaching methods, and student assessment [21:18]
• Why traditional theoretical projects are less relevant, and the growing importance of problem-solving and oral examinations [22:09]

In Their Words

I think we have a much stronger focus on actual lab work. So when I talk to people who hire our students for bachelor’s theses or master’s theses, or even later on for jobs, they really say: you can take our students and put them in a lab and they start working immediately.

A university student might go back to their office and read papers for two weeks before doing their first experiments, which is also a good way to approach things. But our students really have this hands-on experience and this hands-on mentality. So they go into the lab and they want to work with their hands, they want to do stuff in the lab, and they really enjoy the lab work.

Transcript: Is Bioprocess Education Keeping Up With New Tech? The Training Gap Industry Cannot Afford to Ignore - Part 1

David Brühlmann [00:00:37]:
What does it take to walk away from a senior industry role at Bayer running upstream development and choose the classroom instead? Today's guest, Steffen Kreye, did exactly that. With a career spanning Glycotope cell line development labs to leading upstream development at one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, he has now become a professor for industrial biotechnology. He trains the next generation of bioprocess engineers at Berliner Hochschule für Technik in Berlin, Germany.
In part one, we explore his journey, what drove the pivot and the structural challenges facing applied science education today. Welcome, Steffen. It's great to have you on today.

Steffen Kreye [00:02:37]:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

David Brühlmann [00:02:38]:
It's a pleasure. And it's great to reconnect. To get us started, Steffen, share something that you believe about bioprocess development that most people disagree with.

Steffen Kreye [00:02:50]:
That's a tough one from the start. But I think in one of my lectures I always put: “The process is the product.” A very famous quote, I guess, in bioprocessing. And it's kind of true, but your process can be super nice, super sophisticated. But if the product itself — speaking of biopharmaceuticals — isn't working in the clinic, then the process is more or less worthless. So I think, of course, the process is important and we as process engineers really think that it defines the product. And it does. But as I said, it's an important phrase. However, if the product is not working in the clinic or in human trials, then the process can be as nice, as continuous, as AI-driven, or whatever. You don't have a use case for the process. That's something I would not, let's say, 100% agree with.

David Brühlmann [00:03:34]:
A good piece of advice is to always start with the end in mind. And this is what comes to my mind when you're sharing this. Steffen, you have an exciting career path. Draw us into your story. Tell us what sparked your passion for biotech and what were some interesting pit stops along your way.

Steffen Kreye [00:03:54]:
Where do I start? So I guess in school, I wasn't usually the best student, I would say, but in senior high school my interest in mathematics, chemistry, and biology really sparked and, for some reason, I got good at it. I don't really know why. Something clicked in my mind and then I wanted to study this area. And I think biotechnology is the perfect example of combining mathematics, technical aspects, chemistry, and biology. So this was a good fit.

My brother also thought about studying biotechnology. He ended up studying chemistry, which he also really enjoyed. And so I applied for a biotechnology program. And I see the same with my students now. It's very interesting when people start studying biotechnology. I would say most of them don't really know what biotechnology is really about.

I still remember my physics lecture. Physics was my worst module in my whole study course. But there was a PhD student who gave some advice and some lecturing, and he was like, “Well, you guys are biotechnologists and you will be standing in front of a big tank and you will be culturing cells.” And I was sitting there in the first semester, and I was like, “That's not really what I want to do. I want to work with biochemistry and cells and genetics and stuff like that.” And now looking back on my industrial career, I was always standing in front of a big vessel and I was cultivating cells. So it came full circle.

So when I studied biotechnology, I already thought the whole package was really interesting. I got interested in biochemistry. The technical aspects really came later on and led to a focus on bioprocess engineering. Some of my fellow students focused more on cell biology or microbiology. But I always found the technical aspect really interesting.

And I think my study abroad during my master’s in Canada was really interesting and was also the first time I had the pleasure to work with CHO cells. So I think this was an important step. I didn't realize it at that time, but this basically laid the groundwork for my PhD, which I did externally in a company called Glycotope, which is not around anymore, but the affiliated company FyoniBio is still around.

And I think the master’s thesis and then the aspect of bioprocess engineering with mammalian cell production of biopharmaceuticals — this is really where I got good at it. And then, of course, the PhD thesis is also a journey in most cases. I realized during this journey that the initial idea of my PhD thesis was to connect cell line development and molecular biology with the process. But I ended up doing mostly process science and process engineering. And I really enjoyed this — working with a big bioreactor instead of pipetting small amounts of liquid from one tube to another. So this is really where I got into bioprocess engineering: working with bioreactors and also working with biopharmaceutical proteins. I think this was also a very important step in my career.

And then it more or less went along. So I finished my PhD and then I was lucky to stay within the company where I did my PhD. I worked there as a scientist, later on as a group leader for the upstream development team. So this was also very exciting — the first time managing people. And yeah, that was a nice development, I think.

But coming from this rather smaller company, I always had in mind: how do big companies do what I'm doing right now? One time I was looking at job offerings and there was a posting from Bayer. They were looking for a process expert in upstream development. I more or less checked all the boxes and then I applied, got an invitation, had a nice interview, and then I started at Bayer working as an upstream process expert, which sounds nice and fancy.

And later on I got promoted to lab head. So again, I had a small team. And then I worked with Bayer’s project pipeline, developing cell culture processes and also scaling them up and transferring them to the clinical manufacturing sites. This was an interesting journey. When I tell this to my students, usually one of them raises their hand and asks, “Why are you here now? What made you change and come to university or academia?” And this is again a good question.

David Brühlmann [00:07:44]:
That's an excellent question. Yes.

Steffen Kreye [00:07:47]:
It wasn't always like this dream of mine. So a friend of mine, who I studied with and who also became a professor, always had this dream that he would become a professor. I never really had this dream. It was kind of strange. I was enjoying my time at Bayer. I had great colleagues. The stuff that I was doing was awesome. I was doing the stuff that I always enjoyed — working with bioreactors and so on. But I realized that a big corporation is not really my thing. Things kind of move slowly, there’s a lot of bureaucracy. So this is not really something I wanted to do until retirement.

One Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the couch and for some reason I was googling “professor biotechnology.” And in Germany here we have two different kinds of universities. We have the, I would say, traditional universities and then universities of applied sciences, which are more comparable to university colleges. You still get a master’s and a bachelor’s degree, more or less fully comparable to a university degree, but the education is more focused on practical and industrial application.

And I knew, because I had been in industry for seven or eight years, that the classical academic pathway would be more or less impossible or at least very difficult. I didn't have a lot of publications. I had a few patents from my time in industry, but I didn't have the track record of publishing five or six papers a year. So a classical academic career at a traditional university was difficult.
But with my profile, I thought this was a really good match for a university of applied sciences. So I was looking explicitly for this kind of job. And then I googled it one Sunday afternoon on the couch, and the first hit on Google was the job that I'm having right now. So it was something aligned by the universe that this job offering was there at the exact moment when I felt like googling it. And I more or less checked all the boxes again. They were looking for someone who had bioprocess experience working with cell culture. Design of Experiments appeared in the description — it looked like a perfect fit. And then I applied.

The application process for professorships can be quite long and tedious. Also, during this period, COVID-19 happened and this made the application process even longer than I expected. But I guess from sending out the application to having it on paper that I would become a professor was around a year, which is more or less normal even without COVID. So it's a long and very formal application process.

And since five years now, I'm a professor for industrial biotechnology here in Berlin at Berliner Hochschule für Technik, the University of Applied Sciences. And my focus is industrial biotechnology. It's a very broad field, but my focus area is, I think it’s called, applied cell culture. So it really fits well with my profile.

David Brühlmann [00:10:28]:
Yeah, that's exciting. It seems also like a natural evolution of what you've done before. And then it looks like you got interested in the teaching part, but now you can leverage a lot of your expertise and knowledge that you acquired both in a smaller company and in big pharma.

For those who are not very familiar with the, shall I say, dual education system that's very prominent in Germany, also in Switzerland, and in other parts of the world — perhaps people are not so familiar with that. So the mission of universities of applied sciences is to prepare the students directly for industry. Can you tell us a bit what that means? How is, for instance, the teaching or the curriculum different from a traditional university?

Steffen Kreye [00:11:16]:
Right. I think we have a much stronger focus on actual lab work. So when I talk to people who hire our students for bachelor’s theses or master’s theses, or even later on for jobs, they really say: you can take our students and put them in a lab and they start working immediately. A university student might go back to their office and read papers for two weeks before doing their first experiments, which is also a good way to approach things. But our students really have this hands-on experience and this hands-on mentality. So they go into the lab and they want to work with their hands, they want to do stuff in the lab, and they really enjoy the lab work.

And this is also reflected in the curriculum. So we have a strong focus on lab courses. I did my bachelor’s and master’s at a university. Of course, I also had practical training, but not as much as here right now. So, for example, in the fourth and fifth semesters here in our bachelor’s program, the students only have one lecture-based module. Apart from that, they have lab course after lab course after lab course: cell biology, microbiology, genetics. And they also have the option of choosing different elective courses depending on where they want to specialize.

So they really get this hands-on experience, which I think is very valuable because they still get the scientific background, but they also really know how to work in a laboratory. I think this is the key part. But this also brings quite a long list of issues because running a lab and teaching in a lab is very expensive. So if you do computer science or philosophy, you more or less need a computer and maybe a library or something. That's it. But if you run lab courses — especially in a broad field like biotechnology — you need bioreactors, laminar flow hoods for cell culture, microbiology and biochemistry equipment, mass spectrometers, and so on. This is all very expensive.

And this is something that's difficult at the moment because universities in general, I believe, are becoming more financially focused in how they evaluate education. But we of course want to keep our lab focus because this is what differentiates us from traditional universities. And if we are told now that lab courses are too expensive and that we should do more lectures instead, then we become more similar to universities and lose our unique selling point.

So this is really difficult at the moment. I think that's something a lot of universities of applied sciences are struggling with because lab work is just expensive — especially in my field because I come from the biopharma industry. And if I show students a slide with a bioreactor system from a well-known company and tell them this is used for process development and costs half a million euros — which I guess is not that much money for a biopharmaceutical company — for a university that's a huge investment. You’re happy if you get that kind of investment once in your career. And then, of course, you have the ongoing costs of cell culture media, consumables, and so on. So this is really, really a challenge.

David Brühlmann [00:14:02]:
How do you partner with companies? Perhaps there are some investors or other ways to overcome these challenges to stay relevant. And I agree with you that the lab work, the practical work, is extremely important because you don't learn how to operate a bioreactor just by looking at slides. So it's absolutely key. What are some strategies you are undertaking now to still be relevant and to still be able to offer these expensive lab courses?

Steffen Kreye [00:14:34]:
One aspect — which is not really a strategy, but more or less coincidence — is that we are currently in a brand-new building and were lucky to receive some investment connected to this move. So we were able to get new bioreactors, which are very nice, and additional equipment. So at the moment we are quite happy with our equipment situation. But of course the ongoing costs are still important, so we have to see how we handle that.And you mentioned one solution already: partnering with industry. And this is of course something that we do. I have a good network in the Berlin area. Berlin is maybe not that well known for the big players, except for Bayer, but there are a lot of small and mid-sized biotech companies. And with most of them we have good relationships. There are some companies doing basically what I was doing before — process development, upstream process development, downstream process development. Some of our students actually ended up joining those companies and are having a good time there.

And whenever there’s cell culture media that is close to its expiration date or even already expired, I get a call saying there’s some media left over. They can’t use it anymore for GMP work, but for teaching it’s still perfectly fine. If the cells grow 10%, 20%, or even 30% less than their maximum growth rate or viable cell density, that’s still okay for educational purposes. And then I get those materials as donations from the companies.

The same happens with other consumables — Protein A resins, for example. If they’ve already been reused many times in industry, we can still use them for teaching. The same applies to older equipment. Companies contact us, and if you have the right network, you can really leverage these relationships to save money and also stay relevant. The students also get exposed to the same materials and systems used in industry. And for the companies, it’s also a form of branding because students see the company names on media bottles, flasks, or equipment. So both sides benefit. This works really nicely.

The other aspect is that, due to the nature of a university of applied sciences, my colleagues and I usually don’t run large independent research groups. At a traditional university you often have professors with several postdocs, PhD students, master’s students, and bachelor’s students. Here, only a few colleagues have that kind of structure. Most of us are really focused on teaching and training students.

As a result, bachelor’s and master’s theses are usually completed outside the university. Students go to companies around Berlin and Brandenburg, sometimes elsewhere in Germany or even abroad. And this is also very interesting for me because I supervise and evaluate theses that were not done in my own lab. So students go to Bayer, other biotech companies around Berlin, or to Charité — where I think most of our students end up. Charité is one of the biggest university hospitals in Germany, if not Europe, and they do cutting-edge research there. And then you read a bachelor’s thesis or a master’s thesis and it becomes a way for me to stay up to date with recent developments in the field.

David Brühlmann [00:17:17]:
Speaking of staying up to date, there is no doubt about that. We're in a very fast season of change in the industry. There's so many new technologies coming — modeling, digital technologies, AI, and lots more robotics. How do you stay relevant in your teaching and also in the context of the challenges you've just mentioned regarding infrastructure? How does that work?

Steffen Kreye [00:17:43]:
Similar to what I've mentioned before, one way to stay relevant and up to date is through the master’s and bachelor’s theses that I read. Very exciting. It's also always educational for me to read something new. Apart from that, of course, visiting conferences is nice, which is also usually connected with fees, which is of course normal. But coming from academia, you usually get a discount. So conferences are always useful for me to see what's going on, which topics are relevant, and so on.

I think this is really important. I don't have the perfect answer right now, but I just realized this semester — I've been teaching for five years now — and most of the slides were prepared five years ago. When I talk about biopharmaceutical development, how many biosimilars are out there, what the capabilities of CMOs are, which CMOs are most relevant, or what global cell culture capacity looks like, I notice that I collected all these numbers five years ago and they are still on my slides.

Sometimes I see projections from 2021, and the projections go to 2022, 2023, 2024 — and I just realized those were projections five years ago. Now the world has moved on. Even those topics that I mention are not really fast-evolving compared to areas like AI. Cell culture capacity, for example, is not changing as rapidly as digital technologies. So I never wanted to become one of those professors where you open a lecture and at the bottom of the slide it says “Summer Semester 1988” or something like that. So I really don't want to do that.

After five years I realized I need to go over my slides again and update the numbers and include more recent publications. This is an ongoing process. I would love to have more time to do this. As a lecturer at a university of applied sciences, you typically have to do twice as much teaching as at a traditional university. And this takes up most of my time. In the morning I'm giving lectures, and in the afternoon I'm in the lab with the students, which is also very unique for our university. When I studied at a traditional university, in five years I was maybe in the lab once with a professor. In most cases, lab courses were taught by PhD students who had to do it — they weren't necessarily excited about it. Here, we actually want to do it. So our engagement and excitement is much more visible.

This takes up most of my time. What is really fun, though, is taking slides from five years ago and seeing what has changed — and updating them. Maybe including more relevant topics like cell and gene therapy. This is something I always emphasize: if I were a student today, I would probably go into that area because it's extremely exciting — with risks, but also huge potential impact. As a process engineer, especially, the processes for cell and gene therapy are developing as we speak. I don't have that much experience in this area yet — my background is mainly in classical biologics, proteins, antibodies, and so on — but I think this field is very exciting. I would love to work in it.

David Brühlmann [00:20:33]:
Yeah, it's definitely exciting. I mean, there's so much going on. And as you mentioned, in cell and gene therapy, for instance, I'm wondering, Steffen, how has the teaching style or teaching strategy evolved, especially with AI or research itself? We now get access — what used to take weeks to gather from publications can now be done with an AI prompt in minutes, giving you a huge list of recent papers. So that changes the game quite a lot. What is your perspective? What have you already implemented, or what is coming, in order to provide the best possible teaching style and content for students and to prepare them for today's industry?

Steffen Kreye [00:21:18]:
That's an excellent question. I think maybe we can break it into two parts. What I realized when I went to university is that some professors come into the lecture hall, present their slides, and when the time is up, they leave. For us here at the University of Applied Sciences, we've tried to engage much more with students. It's not just standing in front and speaking for 90 minutes. It's more like a dialogue — more like a seminar.

We use polls, small interactive elements, or we give students challenges and let them work on them in small groups for 5–10 minutes and then reconvene. I think that's changing, and it's also more relevant today than simply memorizing facts — really thinking about problems and how to solve them. This shift was already happening even before AI.

And AI is, of course, a big topic in education. I think the classical semester project is not really worth it anymore. If you have a theoretical project and write about it, you can give the right prompts to an AI and get a very good-quality report in our domain.
However, lab work still cannot be replaced by AI. And even creating graphs and interpreting results is still difficult for AI to do properly. Writing an introduction, for example, is perfect for AI — no problem at all.

So sometimes when I request lab protocols, I even tell students they don't need to spend time writing the introduction because AI can do that in one minute. They should focus instead on structuring their data and interpreting their results. And of course, literature research is another big area. I still remember my PhD, bachelor’s, and master’s work — searching for papers was very time-consuming. AI is a huge help here, and I want students to use it because it's a tool that is not going away. They need to learn how to use it correctly.

But if they write an introduction and it is incorrect or imprecise because of poor prompting, they cannot say “that was the AI.” It's still their responsibility. And when they use AI, they must cite it. We have guidelines stating how to write scientific reports, and they must include a section explaining which tools they used and how they used them. From a grading perspective, I still evaluate things like language quality and grammar. But I think this is becoming less relevant now because AI can polish any text into a formally perfect document.

So the focus is shifting toward understanding: did the student actually understand what they did and what the results mean? We still have oral defenses for bachelor’s and master’s theses, and I think this will become even more important. Instead of only evaluating written work, we need to verify understanding in discussion — whether the student really did the work or whether AI produced it.

David Brühlmann [00:24:15]:
That tension between industry pace and academic cycles is something every educator in biotechnology is navigating right now. And there are no easy answers. In part two, we go deeper with Steffen Kreye. We look into AI, machine learning, and bioprocessing, which human skills are becoming more valuable, and what a well-trained bioprocess engineer will need to look like in 2035.

If this episode resonated, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your preferred platform. It means a great deal to me. Thank you for tuning in. For additional bioprocessing tips, visit us at www.smartbiotechscientist.com. Stay tuned for more inspiring biotech insights in our next episode. Until then, let's continue to smarten up biotech.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, it may contain errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. The text has been lightly edited and optimized for readability and flow. Please do not rely on it as a verbatim record.

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Thanks for tuning in to the Smart Biotech Scientist podcast and being part of this journey toward bioprocess mastery. For more insights and practical tips, visit www.smartbiotechscientist.com.

About Steffen Kreye

Steffen Kreye is Professor of Industrial Biotechnology at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik in Berlin. He combines deep academic expertise with extensive industry experience, having worked his way from PhD research in bioprocess engineering at the TU Berlin into leadership roles in upstream process development. Before entering academia, he held senior positions at Glycotope and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, where he led cell line and upstream development teams focused on recombinant protein and antibody production. Today, he trains the next generation of bioprocess engineers at the intersection of science and industry.

Connect with Steffen Kreye on LinkedIn.

Further Listening

If you’re interested in exploring further the concepts we touched on, take a look at these related discussions:

Ep 175–176 : How Virtual Reality Training Solves Europe's Bioproduction Talent Shortage with Sandrine Lemoine — about training the next generation of biopharma talent.

Ep 93–94: From Lab Coat to LinkedIn: Benjamin McLeod's Journey to Cell and Gene Therapy Influencer — another career pivot story from a scientist who stepped outside the traditional industry path.

Ep 111–112: AI Meets Biology: Why Domain Expertise Still Rules in the Age of Large Language Models with Lars Brandén — very aligned with Steffen's nuanced take that AI is a tool but human expertise in bioprocessing still matters.

He is also a biotech technology innovation coach, technology transfer leader, and host of the Smart Biotech Scientist podcast—the go-to podcast for biotech scientists who want to master biopharma CMC development and biomanufacturing.  

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