Green Chemistry Technology Platform

Enzymes are proteins or RNAs produced by living cells that are highly specific and catalytically efficient for their substrates. Biocatalysis is a technology that uses enzymes as catalysts to facilitate synthetic reactions and has many advantages over traditional chemical synthesis. Biocatalysis technology avoids the use of toxic catalysts and, due to the mild reaction conditions, water is used as a solvent so generating less waste and toxic by-products. Meanwhile, Biocatalysis technology possesses a high degree of specificity, which can effectively shorten the synthetic route and provide better stereoivity and catalytic efficiency.

How does it work?

With years of research and technical know-how accumulation, we have mastered biocatalysis technology and built an enzyme catalytic chemistry platform. This platform integrates enzyme construction, enzyme fermentation, enzyme screening, enzymatic process optimization and scale-up manufacturing. The construction of an autonomous enzyme library refers to the introduction of target enzyme genes into host cells (usually E. coli or yeast cells) using molecular biology techniques, followed by the fermentation and optimized expression of recombinants containing the target genes to produce a large number of target proteins, i.e., enzyme proteins required for specific reactions.

We apply biocatalysis technology to reductase-catalyzed reactions, lipase-catalyzed reactions and transaminase-catalyzed reactions, and we have several cases of successful application of biocatalysis technology for scale-up manufacturing.

Reductase-catalyzed reaction: We have applied biocatalysis technology for the synthesis of chiral alcohols many times. For some compounds that are difficult to synthesize by chemical approach, by using reductase from our enzyme library, we can efficiently obtain high-quality products and effectively fix the issues in the synthetic routes. Also for products originally intended for SFC preparation, with the enzyme catalysis approach it can achieve higher throughput, time and cost savings.
Lipase-catalyzed reaction: Lipase-catalyzed reactions through esterification, hydrolysis and transesterification, can achieve long-range steric structure modulation and can be free from the aqueous medium to complete the catalytic reaction in the completely organic phase. The enzymes can be recycled several times for continuous production, significantly reducing manufacturing costs.
Transaminase-catalyzed reactions: In a reaction to generate chiral amines, we used enzymatic approach to achieve chiral compound than through three-step chemical synthesis. The chiral amine product obtained in this step has less impurities, high stereoivity with greatly improved yield. It also helped the reduction of energy consumption and less waste generation, a truly green and economical approach.

Biocatalysis Chemistry Platform

For some specific reactions, we choose target enzymes by high-throughput screening from existing enzyme libraries, and then perform process optimization in terms of relevant chirality and conversion rate to improve respective parameters for chiral swift synthesis and chiral separation based on the preliminary screening results and product target requirement.