Peter Ertl, born in 1970, studied food and biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna. He obtained a PhD in chemistry from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and subsequently spent several years as a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2003, Dr. Ertl founded RapidLabs Inc., a biotech start-up active in the field of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, at which he was Director of Product Development until 2005. In 2006, after eight years in North America, he returned to Austria to establish a microfluidics research group in the BioSensor Technology unit of the Austrian Institute of Technology as a senior scientist. After several scientific functions as a visiting scientist at UC Berkeley (Fulbright Scholarship 2012), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and University of California’s San Francisco Medical Center, and qualifying as a professor in nanobiotechnology, Dr. Ertl was appointed Professor for Lab-on-a-Chip Systems in Bioscience Technologies at the Faculty of Technical Chemistry of Vienna University of Technology in 2016. His research focuses on the development of chip-based human disease models, so-called organ-on-a-chip systems, to investigate disease and healing processes in the context of personalized medicine.

Leitmotif

Organ-on-a-Chip ROCKS

Activities

In his more than 20-year scientific career, Dr. Ertl has specialized in the development of biosensors and lab-on-a-chip systems for biomedical applications. He is also co-founder and CTO of SAICO Biosystems KG. Dr. Ertl is a member of various scientific and industrial advisory boards, editor of the open access journal Organs-on-a-Chip, speaker of the Austrian Microfluidics Initiative (AMI) and visiting scientist at the Imperial College London.

Awards

For developing a personalized midbrain-on-a-chip model (Parkinson-on-a-Chip) to understand neurodegenerative processes, Professor Peter Ertl and his team were awarded the 2020 Houska Prize (3d Audience Prize) in the category “Higher Education Research”.

Focus

Professor Peter Ertl's “Cell Chip Group” at Vienna University of Technology focuses on researching and establishing complex in vitro organ and disease models, which are studied in credit card sized microchips. This novel technology makes it possible to precisely mimic and control human physiological processes for medical research. The group also works on developing highly integrated lab-on-a-chip systems, focusing on industrial design criteria, the standardization of organ-on-a-chip technology as well as prototyping and large-scale manufacturing.

Methods

• Rapid prototyping of microfluidic biochips including design, simulation and system integration
• 2D and 3D cell biology including single cells, multicellular systems, spheroids and organoids
• Optical and electrical biosensors
• Self-powered sensing applications