Imperagen, developing a breakthrough technology needed to bring ultra-fast enzyme engineering to market

全球迫切需要应对气候紧急情况和不可持续的工业活动造成的环境灾难。化学制造依赖于高污染的石化过程，这些过程消耗大量能源，产生有毒废物，并依赖日益稀缺的金属催化剂。整个化学工业都需要对化合物进行化学修饰，引入新的化学性质，这对于生产我们所依赖的产品至关重要，因为它们具有宝贵的性质，但具有巨大的环境成本。然而，有一个自然的解决方案。酶是生物分子规模的工厂，可以执行这些化学修饰，但具有在低温、温和条件和生物降解性方面的优势。面对气候变化，酶是维持工业流程的关键解决方案之一。基于酶的合成技术可以在药品、材料和消费品等基本化学品中引入特定的化学修饰，但以可持续的方式。然而，问题是，为一种新的化学过程开发酶是非常复杂的。由于酶的分子结构复杂，要找到改进的地方就像大海捞针。为了满足市场需求，Impergen(从曼彻斯特大学剥离出来的英国公司)正在开发一种超高速酶工程平台，该平台可以为现有的化学工程过程快速重新设计酶。该项目将用于开发和采用Imperagen技术的一个新的和重要的补充。这一突破将极大地提高其技术的速度、效率和吞吐量，并建立一个可在几周而不是几个月内交付的酶工程平台，使我们能够以更快、更高效的速度将新产品推向市场。我们的专有技术如果成功部署，将带来巨大的商业机会，但目前受到关键工艺瓶颈的限制。通过这个项目消除这些瓶颈将是非常具有挑战性的，需要开发创新的解决方案。然而，成功的部署将使我们的超高速酶工程平台得以实现，为多个高价值市场领域打开新的商业机会。

There is a global urgency to address the climate emergency and the environmental disaster from unsustainable industrial activity. Chemical manufacturing depends on highly polluting petrochemical-based processes that use substantial energy, produce toxic waste and dependant on increasingly scarce metallic catalysts. Chemical modification of compounds that introduces new chemical properties is required across the chemical industry and is critical to produce products that we depend upon due to their valuable properties, but with a substantial environmental cost.There is however, a natural solution. Enzymes are biological molecular scale factories that can perform these chemical modifications but with the advantage of working at low temperatures, mild conditions and biodegradability. Enzymes are one of the key solutions to maintain industrial processes in the face of climate change. Enzyme-based synthesis technology can introduce specific chemical modifications into essential chemicals such as pharmaceuticals, materials and consumer products, but in a sustainable manner. The problem, however, is that development of enzymes for a new chemical process is highly complex. Due to the complex molecular structure of an enzyme, finding improvements is like searching for needle in a haystack. It is costly and takes months of development, requires significant labour with highly unpredictable outcomes of success.To meet the market need, Imperagen (A UK based Spin Out from The University of Manchester) is developing an ultra-fast enzyme engineering platform, which can rapidly re-engineer enzymes for existing chemical engineering processes. This project will be used to develop and adopt a new and significant addition to Imperagen's technology. This breakthrough will dramatically increase its speed, efficiency and throughput of the technology and build an enzyme engineering platform that can deliver down to weeks, not months, allowing us to bring new products to market at a much accelerated and efficient rate.Our proprietary technology presents a huge commercial opportunity if successfully deployed, but at present is limited by key process bottlenecks. Removal of these bottlenecks through this project will be highly challenging and require innovative solutions to be developed. However, successful deployment will enable the realisation of our ultra-fast enzyme engineering platform, opening up new commercial opportunities into multiple high value market sections.