Discussing the enzyme toolbox of the future

On 03 December, CLIB brought together more than 100 participants for the last webinar of the year. Under the title “From Nature to Industry – Advancing the Enzyme Toolbox” three speakers presented, how they are working on making more enzymatic reactions feasible for industrial use.

Carla C. C. R. de Carvalho associate professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa presented how her working group is not only collecting and screening new microorganisms from extreme environments, but also how they identify and develop industrial process conditions. She emphasised the importance of academic-industrial cooperation to understand industry needs and target research respectively.

Rob Schoevaart, Managing Director of ChiralVision, talked about the past developments in enzyme immobilisation since it’s invention more than 100 years ago and the new trends such as the use of biobased beads made from cellulose instead of fossil-based polymers. With the market for enzyme immobilisation doubling or tripling every 10 years, and even more developments in academia, enzyme immobilisation will become even more important for industrial processes in the future.

Carsten Hjort, Senior Director, Production Strain Technology at Novonesis walked us through the process to discover, optimise, scale, produce and approve a novel enzyme at Novonesis. In addition to the many feedback loops between the individual departments and steps, he also reported that the production process must comply with Novonesis standards and that the required purity of the product must already be guaranteed by the process, as complex purification is too costly.

After the three presentations, the speakers engaged in a discussion with the participants on current bottlenecks and the future of enzyme development. Both the speakers and the audience agreed, that regulation and cost are major challenges in bringing enzymes into industrial use, but also the availability of scaling facilities can be a bottleneck in development. Looking back on how much has changed in the past 10 years – especially with digital tools and AI emerging – the speakers attempted to venture a glimpse into the future. They expect development times to shorten even further due to better models predicting enzyme function from amino acid sequence and costs of enzyme production to decrease allowing completely new industries to include enzymatic reactions in their processes.

We thank all speakers and participants for this insightful webinar.