Biochemist and innovator. Driven by a passion for modelling biology and for translating science into industrial solutions. Piloting enterprises into new horizons requires navigating along a solid scientific trajectory.
Christian C. Gruber graduated in biochemistry at the University of Graz, where he received his PhD in bioorganic chemistry and structural biology. During his studies, he moved to the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, before joining the Cluster of Excellence “Simulation Technology” at the University of Stuttgart. He later worked at the Austrian Center for Industrial Biotechnology in the area of Industrial Protein Design & Engineering. In 2018, he co-founded Innophore, a fast growing research company that serves industrial and pharmaceutical clients in enzyme and drug discovery and has collaborated with Google and Amazon since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, he also joined the University of Graz again and now teaches structural bioinformatics and molecular virology.
His research focuses on understanding the dynamic behavior of biomolecules. In his research group and in his company, the structural, functional, dynamic and thermodynamic properties of biological systems are studied using computational methods such as structural bioinformatics, data mining and artificial intelligence. He uses various incarnations of the Catalophore approach, a method for describing the multivariate, volumetric property fields projected by biomolecules into their environment. Combined with modern high-performance computing techniques and cloud infrastructures, this enables a deeper understanding of biological processes and the advancement of drug and protein discovery applications for the biotechnology, biomedical, and pharmaceutical industries.