Heidelberg & Greifswald (Germany), February 22nd 2021 – EMBLEM Technology Transfer GmbH and Enzymicals AG enter into a partnership on the use of innovative computational tools to feed the company’s product pipeline.
EMBLEM Technology Transfer GmbH, the exclusive technology transfer partner of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Europe’s flagship laboratory in the life sciences, and Enzymicals AG, a German enterprise focusing on industrial biocatalysis, today announce a non-exclusive license and collaboration. The parties will leverage Transform-MinER, a novel in silico tool package developed at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), to identify novel high value-added biosynthetic enzyme reactions with relevance to Enzymicals’ proprietary product portfolio. This will enable Enzymicals to develop competitive production pathways for a range of chemicals.
Transform-MinER is a cheminformatics tool for enzyme reaction discovery that has been developed by Dr. Jonathan Tyzack in the group of Prof. Dame Janet Thornton at the EMBL-EBI. It employs high-throughput analytics to identify novel high value reactions for a given enzyme. The results can be used for the optimization of biocatalytic processes and allows for a more sustainable production of chemicals.
Enzymicals offers a broad selection of chemoenzymatically produced, high-quality chemicals. The production processes are developed internally based on Enzymicals technology platform and resulting products are available directly from the company at a kilogram-scale or bulk quantities within the companies industrial network. This collaboration enables Enzymicals to identify novel pathways or improve existing production and therefore expanding their product portfolio.
CEO of Enzymicals AG, Dr. Ulf Menyes, states “In addition to our successful activities in contract research and manufacturing, we have continuously been focused on expanding our own product-based business. We now have a proven track record for implementation of our biocatalytic processes at the sites of our clients and a well-established network of custom-manufacturing companies for bulk supply. Concomitantly, we have also built-up and expanded our own production capacities. This cooperation will further fuel our product pipeline and allow us to fully utilize the manufacturing capacities available at our sites in Greifswald and the new plant planned in Anklam. I am really pleased that with EMBL-EBI we have a strong collaboration partner with complementary technology and expertise.”
Enzymicals co-founder and business development manager Dr. Rainer Wardenga adds “The tailored exploration of the chemical biosynthetic space by the use of Transform-MinER’s ligand-based methodology with chemoinformatic fingerprints is beneficial for us to more efficiently commercialize our existing technology platform and its biocatalytic potential. We are convinced that the use of this early-stage tool in synthetic analysis will lead to the identification of many diverse business opportunities in field of chemical manufacturing.”
“We are delighted to have Enzymicals, an innovative and growing enterprise as a partner and to contribute to their success. We will combine Transform-MinER, a sophisticated computational tool developed at EMBL-EBI, with the profound technical expertise of Enzymicals, to advance and accelerate the development of novel, valuable biosynthetic pathways to high impact chemicals. Transform-MinER is very versatile and we are looking forward to using Transform-MinER in many such partnerships and numerous applications in future” says Dr. Birgit Kerber, Head Innovation and Translation EMBL-EBI at EMBLEM.
Dr. Gábor M. Lamm, Managing Director of EMBLEM adds: “EMBL is a very innovate institute at the forefront of life science research that aims to contribute to solving society’s most pressing challenges. Transform-MinER has the potential to replace inefficient and energy intensive traditional chemical syntheses with green biotechnology and it will be exciting to see the technology applied in a plethora of areas in the future.”
Industrial Biotechnology is gaining importance as the need for more sustainable production processes becomes compelling. Biocatalytic synthesis can perform important chemistry under mild conditions facilitated by enzymes and thus considerably reduces environmental and manufacturing costs. To succeed at scale it is imminent to combine excellent computational tools with cutting-edge production technologies.