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。化学品制造依赖于高污染的石油化工工艺，这些工艺消耗大量能源，产生有毒废物，并依赖于日益稀缺的金属催化剂。对化合物进行化学改性以引入新的化学性质是整个化学工业所需要的，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特性，但需要付出巨大的环境成本。然而，有一种天然的解决方案。酶是生物分子规模的工厂，可以进行这些化学修饰，但具有在低温，温和条件和生物降解性下工作的优点。酶是应对气候变化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将特定的化学修饰引入基本化学品，如药物，材料和消费品，但以可持续的方式。然而，问题是，开发用于新化学过程的酶是非常复杂的。由于酶的复杂分子结构，寻找改进就像大海捞针。为了满足市场需求，Imperagen（一家英国曼彻斯特大学的Spin Out）正在开发一个超快速酶工程平台，它可以快速地重新设计现有化学工程过程中的酶。该项目将用于开发和采用Imperagen技术的新的重要补充。这一突破将大大提高其速度，效率和技术的吞吐量，并建立一个酶工程平台，可以交付到几周，而不是几个月，使我们能够把新产品推向市场，在更快和更有效的速度。我们的专有技术，如果成功部署，提供了一个巨大的商业机会，但目前受到关键工艺瓶颈的限制。通过这一项目消除这些瓶颈将具有很大的挑战性，需要制定创新的解决方案。然而，成功部署将使我们的超快速酶工程平台得以实现，为多个高价值市场领域开辟新的商业机会。

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.