Great Demand for Biosensors in the east and west

The new company will receive financial support from the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology in Bonn as weIl as from the Berlin Senate. It has a staff of eleven, eight of whom are working in research. The company al ready has orders from German firms, three of which are in the new federal states.

Scheller has been working in the research group "biosensors" at the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) for Molecular Medicine, which has given hirn financial support. The MDC, a large research center founded in January 1992, was formed from three central institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the former GDR. Such new firms, according to Professor Detlev Ganten, Director of the MDC, should be given priority in a new technology park being established in Berlin Buch.

 
The spectrum of the biosensors developed by Scheller and his staff ranges from medicine to ecology. Scheller already developed the first commercially used biosensor in what was then the Central Institute for Molecular Biology in 1981. This biosensor is still being sold by a west German company. The device measures the level of blood sugar - vital for diabetics - as weIl as the lactic acid content of the blood. Lactic acid, a substance created when there is a lack of oxygen in the ceIls, helps indicate body resilience. The lactic acid sensor is used among other things in heart operations, heart examiniations with catheters and in sports medicine. Just recently Scheller and his staff developed a small portable biosensor to detect lactat. This biosensor is being sold by a company in Magdeburg.

Within the framework of projects supported by the European Community (Eureka) Scheller and his staff have also been working on a new type of biosensor for a faster and more exact diagnosis of cancer and thyroid diseases.

 
Scheller, who views hirnself as a mediator between East and West Europe, is working together with Bulgarians and Russians on projects to test the quality of food.

 
The Buch scientists want to make their measurement methods more precise. They also want to broaden the range of substances to be tested. One goal is to magnify weak signals given off by substances up to ten thousand times. In this wav it would be Dossible to disco ver the smallest amount of drugs, for example.

Scheller has almost one hundred patents including two in the USA, one in Russia, and many in Europe. He has written many books and a great number of scientific publications.