SBIR Phase I: Enzyme Stabilization via Immobilization for Advanced Chemical Manufacturing

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目使环境可持续、低碳、使用长效酶的化学制造成为可能。化工行业严重依赖不可持续的石化原料以及能源和材料效率低下的工艺。大自然可再生地生产各种各样的化学物质和材料，包括空气和阳光中的木材，以及像青霉素这样的救命药物。生物学通过酶的力量创造分子——酶是自然界的催化剂。虽然一些酶已经被用来生产化学品，但酶的寿命通常太短，成本太高，无法创建可扩展的、具有成本效益的化学制造工艺。该项目将使酶在400亿美元的催化剂市场中占有更大的份额，通过扩展一种正在申请专利的方法来延长酶的使用寿命，显著降低酶的成本。该项目将商业化为高毛利率、经常性收入业务，支持工业绿色化学。第一个应用将是香精和香味分子的生产，这些相对高价值的分子目前是在不可持续的、污染的过程中生产的。最终，该解决方案将扩展到更大容量，更低价值的化学品，以更大程度地减少环境污染。此外，由于高环境成本而离开美国的化学制造过程将在国内进行，这一创新将为美国做出贡献。这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目将展示异质聚合物通过工程聚合物-酶相互作用来稳定酶的商业可行性和可扩展性。第一阶段的研究和开发建立在该团队之前在工业化学品制造中的酶稳定工作的基础上，并将开发超稳定酶，以降低香料和香料可持续生产的成本。虽然这项技术已经在实验室规模上为几个早期客户进行了演示，但该项目的一个特别重点是制造过程的规模扩大。这种制造涉及最先进的控制自由基聚合过程，但尚未商业化。传统上，可持续化学制造的方法与可扩展性和单位成本相斗争，因此，该项目旨在降低商业化早期的规模和成本风险。虽然这种规模扩大将在商业化的早期完成，但它是与现有客户合作完成的，以确保大规模产品为生产精细化学品的公司提供价值。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project enables environmentally sustainable, low-carbon, chemical manufacturing with long-lasting enzymes. The chemicals industry relies heavily on unsustainable petrochemical feedstocks as well as energy and materials inefficient processes. Nature renewably produces a diverse array of chemicals and materials, including lumber from air and sunlight and lifesaving therapeutics like penicillin. Biology creates molecules through the power of enzymes – nature’s catalysts. While some enzymes have been leveraged to produce chemicals, enzymes are typically too short lived and expensive to create scalable, cost-effective chemical manufacturing processes. This project will allow enzymes to gain more share of the $40 billion catalyst space by scaling a patent-pending approach to keep enzymes lasting longer, decreasing their costs significantly. This project will be commercialized as a high-gross margin, recurring revenue business, supporting industrial green chemistry. The first application will be the production of flavors and fragrance molecules, relatively high value molecules that are currently produced in unsustainable, polluting processes. Ultimately, this solution will extend to higher volume, lower value chemicals for larger reductions in environmental pollution. Furthermore, the innovation will contribute to the United States by on-shoring chemical manufacturing processes that left the US due to the high environmental costs.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the commercial feasibility and scalability of heterogeneous polymers to stabilize enzymes through engineered polymer-enzyme interactions. The Phase I research and development builds on the team’s prior work on enzyme stabilization in industrial chemical manufacturing and will develop ultrastable enzymes to reduce the cost of sustainable manufacturing of flavors and fragrances. While this technology has been demonstrated for several early customers at the laboratory scale, a particular focus of this project is the scale up of the manufacturing process. This manufacturing involves state-of-the-art controlled radical polymerization processes that have yet to be commercialized. Traditionally, approaches to sustainable chemical manufacturing struggle with scalability and unit costs, and therefore, this project aims to de-risk scale and cost earlier in commercialization. While this scale-up will be done earlier in commercialization, it is done in collaboration with existing customers to ensure the products at scale provide value to the companies producing fine chemicals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.