Sustainable API manufacturing processes

Highly customized biocatalysts can transform active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) manufacturing processes by eliminating steps, increasing yield, and reducing solvent usage and waste. Furthermore, carefully designed multi-step, biocatalytic cascades can be assembled in single reactors to accomplish difficult chemical reactions under mild reaction conditions, which expands the capability, and the efficiency, of sustainable biocatalytic processes at large scale.

Catalysis or biocatalysis?

Validated by performance; trusted by global partners

For many of our global partners, optimized biocatalytic processes enabled by our engineered enzymes have reduced improved capital utilization, yield and quality attributes while achieving desired yield, and several pharmaceutical industry partners have taken the partnership even further and licensed our technology to develop and expand their in-house use of custom enzymes API production.

Challenge

Januvia® is a blockbuster drug for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes, manufactured by Merck. As the drug achieved increased commercial penetration, Merck was faced with building an additional manufacturing facility to keep up with demand, while also encountering capital expenditure challenges.

Januvia® is a registered trademark of Merck & Co.

Solution

Codexis worked collaboratively with Merck to develop a new enzyme catalyst to manufacture the drug more cost-effectively. Our high-performing enzyme catalyst eliminated several steps from the manufacturing process, doubled the measured productivity of the process and significantly reduced capital expenditure requirements.

Evolved biocatalysts perform

Out of 70+ programs and millions of variants analyzed, we offer our best-performing enzymes to you, available in grams to multi-ton scale. The Codex® Ketoreductase Screening Kit has been widely used in active pharmaceutical ingredients synthesis as well as other industrial research areas.
Discover more about our screening kit products.

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Latest News

Codexis and Merck Amend and Extend Supply Agreement for Enzyme Used in Manufacture of Sitagliptin

Codexis Confirms Receipt of Follow-on Orders for Proprietary Enzyme Product from Undisclosed Global Pharmaceutical Company

Scientific highlights

Enzymes for tailored insulin derivatives

A paper authored by Merck and Codexis in the June 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science, details the development of a suite of enzymes and their application for site-selective synthesis of insulin bioconjugates.

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