Folded, Not Flat

Pioneers – Prof. Dr. Jens Elgeti

Jens Elgeti once thought technology transfer had little to do with his work. Then a passing invitation, a medical conference and a folding brain surface opened the way to Microfold.

June 2026

An unexpected insight

At first, technology transfer was little more than a polite goodbye at the station. Jens Elgeti had just stepped out of a car in front of his Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS) in Jülich. A colleague from technology transfer had picked him up from the train. Before driving off, the colleague said: "Why don't you stop by sometime?" Elgeti smiled, nodded - and then, for years, nothing happened.

It was not indifference. It was distance. For two decades, Elgeti had lived largely inside models. At the Institute for Advanced Simulation, where he is now a professor, he developed computer simulations of living systems in motion: sperm cells, tissues, surfaces that bend and buckle. It felt far removed from a product, a clinic or a laboratory bench.

That changed at a conference on men's health. Elgeti suddenly found himself surrounded not by theorists, but by clinicians and medical researchers. They were talking about assisted reproduction, treatment decisions and the limits of the models that shaped those decisions. He calls himself the odd one out in the room: the physicist with the simulations. Yet that outsider's view showed him exactly where his work might matter.

„I realized that, with my theoretical expertise and the right partners, I could make a real improvement.“

— Prof. Jens Elgeti

His first attempt at transfer fell apart when a partner withdrew. Then a collaboration with Prof. Svenja Caspers on cortical folding opened a different path. Elgeti and his team had been modelling how the human cerebral cortex develops its characteristic folds. In the process, they realised something deceptively powerful: the folds could be controlled.

If a fold can be described, it can also be recreated. And if it can be recreated, it may give cells something the lab has long denied them: a surface that behaves a little more like the body.

A Better Stage for Cells

Most cells in laboratory cultures grow on flat plastic. It is convenient, clean and reproducible. It is also a poor imitation of life. Inside the body, cells encounter soft, uneven, three-dimensional environments that push, stretch and signal. A drug candidate that looks promising on a flat dish can later fail because the test conditions were too artificial.

Elgeti's idea is simple in principle: stop forcing cells onto flat ground. His method, called Microfold, creates finely folded surfaces on elastic materials such as silicone or hydrogels. The team stretches the material, cures selected regions and then releases the tension. The surface folds by itself into microscopic structures.

The result is a lab surface that gives cells a more realistic physical environment. Experiments could become more predictive earlier in development, helping pharmaceutical researchers save time and money and, in the long term, reducing the need for animal testing.

The method has another advantage: it does not require cleanroom facilities or expensive lithography. The folded structures can also be flattened and reshaped, which allows coatings of highly uniform thickness and reproducible properties.

For now, Elgeti's team is producing prototypes. Demand is already growing. Whether Microfold becomes a spin-off, a licensing model or a technology used directly by pharmaceutical partners remains open. The next step is finding the funding and collaborations that can carry a folded surface from the physics lab into biomedical research.

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^{Image credi}^t^:^{Jens Elgeti; Forschungszentrum Jülich}

Mehrere Geräte, ein Gehirn und zerknülltes Papier auf orangefarbenem Hintergrund. (Mistral: Mistral Medium 3.5, 2026-06-30)

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