Inside the Jeroen Lammertyn Lab: the art of building tools other scientists can trust

SCIENTIFIC SPOTLIGHT
An editorial series by Atrandi Biosciences

In every lab there’s a quieter narrative running alongside the results: the intriguing questions, the workarounds, the moments when a method finally clicks. Scientific Spotlight is a series of editorial profiles of researchers pushing single-cell science forward. We focus on the science, the journey, and the practical realities behind the headlines – what worked, what didn’t, and what changed their trajectory.

Introduction
For years, droplets were a major part of how the team of Jeroen Lammertyn at KU Leuven approached single-cell problems: fast, elegant, high-throughput. Until the day the workflow asked for something droplets don’t give you easily – a clean way to change conditions, wash, and move through multi-step protocols without turning the experiment into a super technical high-wire act.
That tension, between what single-cell biology demands and what current formats make convenient, is where Prof. Jeroen Lammertyn and Dr. Karen Ven have been building. And it’s what eventually led them to add Semi-Permeable Capsules (SPCs) into their toolkit: not as a replacement, but as a missing block for certain kinds of science.
Twenty years ago, the group began as a technology-driven biosensing team. Today it has grown into a dynamic lab of around forty people, still anchored in the same instinct: work at the interface of biology and technology, and build things that others can use (in academia and in industry) to test their hypotheses and move faster through every part of discovery.
They develop diagnostic tools. They build life science research tools. They do both, and they treat those two directions as deeply connected rather than separate lanes. Find biomarkers with one set of technologies, translate that knowledge into point-of-care tests with another. Keep an eye on application without losing the joy of invention. And if you ask Prof. Jeroen where that instinct came from, his answer doesn’t start with “single-cell”. It starts with fruit.

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