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Can you tell us more about your enzyme development suite at Cardiff and its microfermentation technology capabilities ? When carrying out fermentations on a large scale and scaling up novel fermentation , it ' s really important to be able to scale down . In Cardiff we have half-litre and three-litre fermenters in parallel , so that we can understand how the fermentations work . That gives a well-understood fermentation strain we can scale up reproducibly for more simple and well-understood enzymes . We can go straight from the sequence to maybe 750 litres , then scale up very quickly to 10,000 litres . This ‘ plug and produce ’ system saves time and cost for the customer . We generally work in yeast and bacterial strains within the pharma industry . E . coli is used extensively in plug and produce ; we can just put it straight into an existing production strain and scale up . There ' s always some risk , because this is biology , not chemistry but it ' s a very reliable system . For some of the other systems such as Bacillus or P . pastoris we mayneed to do a little extra work but we ' re looking to bring in the system of putting the enzyme into an existing production state to try and reduce the risk and increase the speed . So far it ' s working well but there are always risks involved . It ' s critically important to have a good discussion upfront about the behaviour of the enzyme so far , if it ' s been made in another facility or within BRAIN Biotech , and where the risk is .
Another of the big capabilities you ' ve been highlighting is the MetXtra enzyme discovery platform that combines bioinformatics and AI with the process . What advantages does that bring ? MetXtra involves three different services . The database is a metagenic database of enzymes from nature with 99.8 % uniqueness so you can always find pharmaceutical enzymes you need for your reactions within our database . For example , BRAIN Biotech recently developed its own CRISPR- Cas number . The nucleases that help protect that came from MetXtra . We then move to the design stage where we look to use AI to design from those hits enzymes not found in nature . Finally we use our discovery platform to interpret the dataset . With our bioinformatic system we home on the structural design and the activity capabilities to refine down , and we draw down from a very large number to a much smaller subset . It ’ s still important to go into the wet lab as often find that you need to refine the results . Unlike most , we have wet lab capabilities in the same facility
What are you doing to addressing the demand demands of the industry particularly in terms of the bioeconomy and green manufacturing ? We should be honest : the pharmaceutical industry is not the
most sustainable in its manufacturing approach or atom-efficiency . Enzymes have many advantages as biocatalysts . The equivalent chemocatalysts use solvents and heavy metals , whereas enzymes only need glucose , water and some small ingredients , such as yeast , to make the fermentation happen . It ' s fantastic from a sustainability perspective when that moves into the customer ’ s process because there is the opportunity to telescope a lot of reaction steps one-by-one . They don ' t need to do all of those work-ups . In a wider context , there are other advantages as well . BRAIN Biotech is active in the food technology industry too and we are looking at producing proteins via precision fermentation for sustainable food and vegan options . We are also recovering waste materials from protein streams to put back into the food chain and waste heavy metals or CO 2
. Here in pharma , though , I think it ' s more about being able to access this wonderful technology much more easily . ●
Daren Bryce
VP , FOOD & PHARMACEUTICALS
BIOCATALYSTS k + 44 7973 419818 J daren . bryce @ biocatalysts . com j www . biocatalysts . com
NOV / DEC 2024 SPECCHEMONLINE . COM
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