Event announcement

Dr. Estelle Clerc will also join us as an expert speaker in our upcoming Spotlight webinar “Water as a Critical Resource of the Future – Technologies for a More Sustainable Chemical Industry” on December 9, where she will present CellX Biosolutions.

She looks forward to engaging directly with participants and answering your questions.

Dear Estelle, could you start by briefly introducing CellX Biosolutions? What exactly do you do, and how do your microbial solutions help degrade persistent pollutants such as PFAS?

CellX Biosolutions is a cleantech company focused on breaking down very persistent industrial pollutants, especially the “forever chemicals” PFAS.

We have built tools that let us find rare bacteria in nature that can actually degrade these chemicals, microbes you would never detect with standard sampling techniques. We then grow and combine them into tailored bacterial consortia that can be used in polluted industrial wastewater, soil, and groundwater.  
 
Our broader vision is to move away from energy-intensive methods like incineration and instead use biology to clean pollution at the source – not only liquid chemical effluents, but also contaminated sites, including soils that are currently considered liabilities, to be revalued and brought back to productive use.  
 
Ultimately, we want to make remediation both sustainable for industry and restorative for the environment. 

What are you currently working on most intensively? Are there any developments or projects that are particularly exciting for you right now?

Right now, we are very focused on applying our bacterial consortia to real industrial samples. We are working across several use cases in parallel: polluted soils, highly concentrated liquid effluents coming from technologies like foam fractionation or reverse osmosis, and solid matrices such as activated carbon and ion-exchange resins.

Through 2026, we will be running a series of lab pilots with our industrial partners, who are providing these different contaminated matrices. The goal is to identify the best performing use-cases, which will be brought into the first industrial pilots we plan for 2027. 

What kinds of challenges or inquiries can companies approach you with? In which cases can CellX provide the most effective support?

Most companies come to us because they have PFAS in different types of matrices, soil, concentrated effluents, activated carbon, resins, that they want to test with our bacteria. Others reach out because they’re dealing with pollutants that are currently sent to incineration, simply because they’re considered non-biodegradable.

In those cases, we run a service project: we go back to the environment with our discovery tools, find new bacteria from scratch, and build a tailored consortium for their specific pollutant and waste stream.

So overall, if a company has a persistent pollutant with no real treatment option other than incineration, that’s exactly where we can help.

Finally: Is there anything you would like to share with our readers as a key message?

We’re always looking to partner with industries facing refractory waste challenges. If a company has pollutants that seem impossible to treat today, we’re happy to explore solutions with them.

Estelle Clerc, PhD, is the CEO and Co-Founder of CellX Biosolutions, an ETH Zurich spin-off pioneering microbial solutions for PFAS and other persistent pollutants. She holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering and Marine Microbiology from ETH Zurich with previous research appointments at MIT.

Estelle leads CellX’s scientific strategy, industrial partnerships, and commercialization of next-generation biodegradation technologies for some of the world’s most recalcitrant contaminants.