Engineered Enzymes Pave Easier, Faster Road to Scalable API Manufacturing
Even the most promising and innovative API is going to be of little value unless it can be affordably manufactured at scale. One approach to achieve that goal that is gaining significant support from pharmaceutical manufacturers is the use of engineered enzymes for the biocatalytic production of increasingly complex synthetic molecules.
A wide variety of catalysts occur in nature, and they have long been used in various ways to enable or to speed up reactions. Until today, the vast majority of catalysts were metallic species, and have been constrained in their catalytic ability or selectivity in a chemical process by nature and structure. They are often not very optimizable beyond their initial performance.
On the other hand, biocatalysts or enzymes can be manipulated significantly through the process of protein engineering. Therefore, we can modify biocatalysts to enhance specific performance characteristics and refine them to achieve their full potential.
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