September 18-21, 2023: visit from India: our long-term chitosan producers, Dr. Dominique Gillet and Mr. Benny Thomas, from Stellar Biosol in Gujarat, India came to discuss future collaborations

This week, right after the excellent chitin and chitosan conference in Iceland, we had our own small, but not less intense chitin and chitosan meeting here in Münster, with two visitors from India. Dr. Dominique Gillet, who has been our main chitosan provider for 25 years, visited us together with Benny Thomas, co-owner of his family's international seafood business. A few years ago, the two of them jointly founded their own chitosan producing company, Stellar Biosol in Gujarat, India. On Tuesday morning, we had a meeting with Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar and Dr. Carolin Richter from our planned start-up greEnCAP, on Wednesday morning with Dr. Anne Vortkamp and Dr. Philipp Lemke from our other planned start-up, AgriBluBio, and on Wednesday afternoon with Dr. Stefan Cord-Landwehr and Margareta Hellmann who have recently performed a lot of analyses on Stellar Biosol chitosans. We made plans for our future collaborations, on the one hand to see how Dominique and Benny can support our start-up teams, and on the other hand how we can support the further development of Stellar Biosol by offering our unique analytical capabilities, in terms of both structural and functional analysis, to optimise their production processes. We have identified so many areas in which our collaboration will be a true win-win situation! We are convinced that jointly, we can make huge steps, and fast, towards science-based utilisation of this precious functional biopolymer, chitosan. This week's meeting marks a milestone in our collaboration!