Biocatalysis Development - Utilising nature’s catalytic systems

Biocatalysis employs biological systems, particularly enzymes, to catalyse chemical reactions. These natural catalysts facilitate chemical transformations on organic compounds, providing significant advantages over traditional methods.

Challenges with Traditional Catalytic Systems

Traditional catalysts, based on inorganic and organic molecules, are essential in synthesizing complex molecules but face several challenges:

• Cost: Catalysts can be very expensive to purchase.
• Maintenance: They often need to be removed from a product and cleaned.
• Specificity: Different reactions use different catalysts, so if you make more than one product, you need more than one catalyst.
• Sensitivity to Impurities: Catalysts can be ruined by impurities, which can cause them to stop working.
• Toxicity: Sometimes, a catalyst can be toxic in nature.
• Waste Disposal: In some cases, especially with homogeneous catalysts, the separation of the product and the catalyst must be done after the reaction, and the waste product must be disposed of.

How Does Biocatalysis Compare?

• Efficiency and Selectivity: Enzymes typically function under mild or biological conditions, which minimises problems of undesired side-reactions such as decomposition, isomerisation, racemisation, and rearrangement. They also exhibit extreme selectivity towards their substrates.
• Environmentally Friendly: Enzymes are environmentally benign, being completely degraded in the environment. This makes biocatalysis a more sustainable option compared to traditional chemical synthesis.
• Versatility: Modern biotechnology, specifically directed evolution, has made the production of modified or non-natural enzymes possible. This allows for a broader substrate range, enhanced reaction rate, or catalyst turnover.
• Industrial Applications: Biocatalysis underpins some of the oldest chemical transformations known to humans, such as brewing. Today, it is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry to make small molecule drugs, and also shows tremendous promise in biotechnology, fine chemicals, and food industries.
• Energy Efficiency: The milder biological reaction conditions reduce energy and reagent cost, allowing for a more economical and ethical process.

How Does Biocatalysis Work?

Enzymes lower activation energy, speeding up reactions by binding substrates at their active sites, facilitating chemical transformations, and repeating the process. This method is extensively utilized in the pharmaceutical industry and holds promise across various sectors.

Biocatalysis utilises natural catalysts to perform chemical transformations on organic compounds:

Enzymes, biological macromolecules, speed up chemical reactions by lowering the activation energy required for the reaction to occur. They do this by binding to substrates through their active site, which is usually very specific for a class of molecules, sometimes even for a single molecule.

Once the substrate is bound to the enzyme, it undergoes a chemical transformation, either breaking down a substrate or combining substrates to form a new product. The product is then released from the enzyme, which can then bind to another substrate and repeat the process.

Biocatalysis is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry to make small molecule drugs, and also shows tremendous promise in biotechnology, fine chemicals, and food industries.

Enzyme Production and Biocatalysis Services with Isomerase

Isomerase provides comprehensive biocatalysis development services across various sectors, acting as an innovation partner from concept to production. Our expertise spans discovering and engineering new enzyme biocatalysts and developing high-titre, scalable manufacturing processes for enzyme production.

Our biocatalysis development services include:

Enzyme Identification: We source strains and prepare genomic DNA, followed by genome sequencing and analysis to shortlist candidate enzymes for expression and testing.
Enzyme Expression: We work with various microbial hosts, including Escherichia coli, Pichia (Komagataella), Bacillus and actinomycetes, to ensure optimal expression systems for commercial processes.
Enzyme Engineering and Evolution: Using synthetic DNA arrays, we screen and identify enzyme candidates with desired properties.
Enzyme USP/DSP Development: From fermentation to purification, we develop processes to access semi-purified enzymes for trials or scaled manufacture.
Reaction and Process optimisation: We offer in-house and bespoke methods to optimize biocatalytic routes, improving parameters like enzyme loading and pH.
Tech Transfer: We generate process documentation and support transferring processes to pilot and manufacturing scales.
Enzyme Supply: We produce gram quantities of enzymes in-house and collaborate with CDMO partners for larger quantities.
Compound Supply: We create diverse compound sets via biocatalytic transformations, aiding drug discovery and optimisation studies.

Conclusion

Biocatalysis offers an orthogonal solution to traditional catalysis. It has a huge potential to provide cleaner and more efficient routes to chemical products, and their exceptional chemo- regio- and enantioselectivity may even be able to access products that have been inaccessible though normal means. Isomerase offers expertise and capabilities to harness biocatalysis's full potential, enabling our partners to achieve more sustainable and efficient production. For more information on our biocatalysis development services or to request a quote, please contact bd@isomerase.com.