AIT India 2025/26: Alpion CryoSolutions
Meet Constantin Krüger, one of the ten participants in the 2025/26 edition of the Academia-Industry Training India program.
Interview with Constantin Krüger
“At Alpion CryoSolutions we want to bring drug development to the next level. Our new patented technology enables us to see proteins while they are working. Recording the way a protein functions exactly will enable a greater understanding of the most important biological processes, which in turn opens up the possibility for new therapeutics.”
What problem does your startup solve, and why is it important to you personally?
At Alpion CryoSolutions we want to bring drug development to the next level. Our new patented technology enables us to see proteins while they are working. Recording the way a protein functions exactly will enable a greater understanding of the most important biological processes, which in turn opens up the possibility for new therapeutics. Furthermore, this technology can provide crucial datasets for AI models such as AlphaFold to predict protein function. I am driven by the pursuit of uncovering nature’s fundamental mysteries; with our technology we will enable scientists to generate many more discoveries where the sky is the limit.
What inspired you to become a sciencepreneur, and what has been your biggest “aha!” moment so far?
Academia or industry? This has been a question I have asked myself for a long time. I love being in a lab and making new discoveries, solving one problem after another, but I felt that there is more to experience, new challenges to take. A sciencepreneur combines the best of both worlds. By making a scientific discovery tangible and bringing it to the market you are having a real-world impact. Founding a startup is truly a journey, it almost feels like you change your mindset every week, because there are so many new things you learn along the way.
What unique perspective does your academic background bring to your startup?
Through my work in different labs, I learned how to solve problems foremost. How to achieve a goal with no guarantee of success. Furthermore, I developed my skills in analytical thinking, data analysis and instrumentation. During my PhD I learned and helped develop our technology to visualize proteins at work, giving me the necessary know-how to bring it to market.
What’s one surprising lesson you’ve learned since launching your startup?
How important it is to communicate your ideas well. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to explain your technology and vision in a way that keeps the essence but is simple and intuitive enough so you can explain it in just a few minutes. I would not have thought that I would be pitching the startup everywhere I go, be it to investors, colleagues or simply friends in a bar.
If you could host a dinner with three innovators (past or present), who would they be and why?
First, I would invite Nikola Tesla, in my opinion the greatest inventor we have ever seen. In 1926 he predicted in an interview the modern-day smartphone, when quantum mechanics was just emerging and the first computer was still decades away. I would ask him about all the ideas and inventions he had that never became public.
Second, I would invite Alain Turing because without the foundation he set, we would not have the computers and technology of today. His unyielding drive enabled him to make a huge contribution to humankind. I would particularly like to ask him how he managed to keep going with all the obstacles thrown in his way.
The third person I would invite would be a present-day successful entrepreneur. Elina Berglund is the CEO of Natural Cycles, an app that helps women track their cycle as a natural birth control method or to help plan a pregnancy. While being a physicist at CERN she identified an important problem and worked on a simple solution that is helping millions of women today. I think entrepreneurs like her are having some of the greatest impacts on our society and I would love to learn from her journey.