Darren Bryce is VP , Food & Pharmaceuticals , at Biocatalysts , a UK firm active in the enzymatic biocatalysis space
Q & A with Biocatalysts
Darren Bryce is VP , Food & Pharmaceuticals , at Biocatalysts , a UK firm active in the enzymatic biocatalysis space
Please tell us a bit more about the company Biocatalysts is a biotech company based in South Wales . We ' re part of the BRAIN Biotech Group out of Germany . As a group , we are focusing on developing and manufacturing biotech products mostly for this industry , mainly enzymes but also anything made through fermentation .
The part you work for is actually called BRAIN Biocatalyst Life Science Solutions and it describes itself as ‘ Simplifying enzyme innovation ’. What do you mean by that exactly ? Biocatalysts have been used in the pharmaceutical industry for the last 20 years . It ' s made some great improvements to the synthesis of small molecule APIs but there ' s still a very big disconnect in the way that the enzymes are developed and supplied . There are enzyme development companies and then there are manufacturing and scaleup companies . With our capabilities within BRAIN Biotech Group , we are looking to bring together those two parts . Biocatalysts has supplied enzymes to the pharmaceutical industry for ten years , while BRAIN has been a pioneer in the biotech industry for the last 30 years . Putting those capabilities together , we are looking to provide an end-to-end solution to the industry . The two companies have aligned their core competencies to revolutionize enzyme development within the life science market by addressing the significant challenges of IP restrictions and scale-up . This is the really unique part of what we ' re doing . The main restriction within the industry has been access to IP . Pharma companies pay quite significant development costs to develop a unique enzyme for their process but still lack access to the IP at the end . There are still complicated royalty models . Because we ' re bringing together two successful businesses , we won ' t have to rely on licensing and IP models to make our revenue - we do that through manufacturing . When we manufacture and scale up the product we ' ll include a royalty-free licence for the material that we supply . Supply chain security is important so we understand that company will want dual supply freedom to operate . We ' re quite happy to work with that on flexible packages and to provide upfront licensing costs , if that ' s what the customer needs
Have you actually started combining BRAIN ’ s expertise in enzyme discovery and optimization with your commercial scale manufacturing capabilities and are there any case studies that you could share ? So far we ' ve carried out 170 scale-up projects within our facility in Cardiff and many enzyme discovery projects in BRAIN . Some have gone all the way through from discovery . Recently , a customer came to us with a sequence they had been manufacturing elsewhere . Within five months we went from sequence to scaling up 100 kilos of enzymes . Those sorts of timescales are really unprecedented within the market .
You offer precision fermentation services to the food and pharma industries . What is that exactly ? It ’ s probably easiest to explain what it isn ' t . Traditional fermentation , like sugar to alcohol in brewing or separating out the curds and whey in cheese making are imprecise fermentation : the raw materials are natural and not very pure , they are put in the fermenter in one batch and left to run their course . When we ' re trying to make a specific biocatalyst we have a precise fermentation of pure materials and we control the addition of raw materials so that the production strain - the bacteria or yeast - will be able to produce the specific protein required . At that point , we break the protein away , purify it and use it as a biocatalyst
24 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981