From Microscopic Droplets to Complex Manufacturing Processes

New research group at the Max Planck Institute in Magdeburg studies phase transitions of biomolecules

The new research group Phase Transition Engineering, led by Dr. Leif-Thore Deck, started work at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg on 1 September 2026. The group combines experiments in tiny droplets with computer models to better understand and more precisely control the manufacturing processes of medicines.

Phase transitions are central to many manufacturing processes in chemistry and pharma: most active pharmaceutical ingredients are crystallized and processed into tablets, while biopharmaceuticals are frozen and freeze-dried. In these processes, molecules change from one state to another, from dissolved to solid or from liquid to frozen. These transitions take place at the molecular level and are difficult to control. Yet they determine the quality of medicines manufactured in large-scale industrial manufacturing.

This is where the new group comes in. Using droplet microfluidics, millions of tiny droplets are generated under precisely controlled conditions. Each droplet is smaller than the diameter of a human hair and represents a small experiment of its own. This makes it possible to study in detail how crystals, ice or other new phases form, with high statistical power and minimal material consumption. This is particularly important for pharmaceutically relevant biomolecules such as proteins, peptides or RNA, as they are often expensive and available only in small quantities.

The obtained data are instrumental to the development of mechanistic models that accurately describe the underlying physics of the phase transition. These models, in turn, enable the transfer of experimental results from the microdroplets to larger scales: from laboratory experiments to pilot plants and industrial processes. The long-term goal is to optimize manufacturing processes for pharmaceuticals and chemicals and to make them more robust, without having to test every process variant at full scale at great expense.

“We want to connect the scales: what we observe in tiny droplets and understand through models will help develop industrial processes faster and in a more targeted way,” says Leif-Thore Deck.

Understanding phase transitions of biomolecules is also relevant beyond the industrial manufacturing of pharmaceuticals: in some neurodegenerative diseases, naturally occurring proteins in the body undergo harmful phase transitions such as aggregation or condensation. The group aims to use the same methods to better understand these processes.

Independent Max Planck Research Group with links across the institute

Leif-Thore Deck heads an independent Max Planck Research Group with an open research topic, which he was awarded through the Max Planck Society’s free-floating programme. The programme enables outstanding early-career researchers to pursue their own research ideas independently of a predefined field.

At the Max-Planck-Institute in Magdeburg, he sees numerous avenues for collaboration: with process engineering and synthetic biology in Prof. Kai Sundmacher’s department, with the crystallization and precipitation of (bio)pharmaceutical compounds in the team of Prof. Heike Lorenz, and with the microfabrication research of Prof. Sohini Kar-Narayan (Department of Materials Systems Engineering), whose sensors offer great potential for use in microfluidic platforms. It is expected that many more collaborations with the other research groups at the MPI will develop in the future.

About Dr. Leif-Thore Deck

Leif-Thore Deck grew up in Karlsruhe. He studied Chemical and Bioengineering at ETH Zurich, with research stays at the National University of Singapore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and received his doctorate in mechanical and process engineering from ETH Zurich. His doctoral thesis addressed the nucleation of ice, the freezing and freeze-drying of vaccines, and the development of complex crystallization processes for active pharmaceutical ingredients. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge. In 2026, he received the EFCE Excellence Award in Crystallization from the European Federation of Chemical Engineering, which honours the best European doctoral thesis in the field of crystallization.