Christian Brönnimann is Entrepreneur of the Year

DECTRIS founder and CEO Christian Brönnimann has received the prestigious Entrepreneur Of The Year award. He was honored at the annual EoY award ceremony by Ernst & Young, the globally acting corporate services firm, in the category Industry/High-Tech/Life Sciences. He outclassed a field of fifty contenders and impressed the jury. "The award is a great honor for me and a recognition of both the past successes of DECTRIS and its future potential. I’m grateful to everybody in the company, since this prize is a shared achievement. It motivates us to further develop our instruments for industrial and medical applications to the benefit of society", says Christian.

The foundation of most breakthroughs in science that will eventually improve our lives is the hard work of visionaries and innovative instrumentation. Twenty years ago at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Christian began developing a new kind of X-ray camera that could deliver more accurate data much faster than existing detectors. The efforts culminated in the PILATUS detector in 2005. Christian recognized the commercial potential of the technology and, together with three partners, founded DECTRIS in 2006.

By now, we have grown to more than 110 people and have shipped more than 2000 detectors to research centers worldwide. The most important application remains protein crystallography in basic and pharmaceutical research. These days, the majority of new protein structures are solved with data from our detectors. Among them are surface proteins of the Zika virus  whose structure determination in 2016 is the basis of intense vaccine development efforts and a PET-degrading enzyme with great potential in the fight against microplastics pollution.