The company has been selected, for the second year in a row, to Cleantech Group’s list if companies taking action on the climate crisis.

“It’s a recognition of our ongoing quest to deliver innovative solutions that can help all of us find cleaner, less wasteful ways to live, and to put society back on a climate-positive path toward a sustainable future,” stated the company.

The chemistry industry has a central role to play in the mitigation of climate change, before 2050 it needs to cut its own emissions by half, while at the same time quadrupling production to meet the needs of the world’s growing population.

EnginZyme has developed a cell-free synthetic biology platform that can provide R&D services to companies in multiple industries, including the pharma industry. The technology platform combines the breadth and power of nature (enzymatic cascades) with the efficiency of the chemical industry (packed bed reactors) in a best-of-both-worlds technical solution.

For example, pharmaceuticals are often complex molecules that demand an advanced synthesis in several steps, which produces a lot of waste.”

“When it comes to the pharma industry, for active pharmaceutical substances there are many advantages with our technology. For example, pharmaceuticals are often complex molecules that demand an advanced synthesis in several steps, which produces a lot of waste. But by using enzymes in combination with flow chemistry (our technology) there are less steps, the amount of waste is decreased and the manufacturing process becomes simpler, cheaper and more environmentally friendly,” describes Dr. Karim Engelmark Cassimjee, CEO and co-founder of EnginZyme to NLS.

The long-term aim is to make its cell-free synbio platform the foundation upon which the future chemical industry rests.

There’s just so much more you can do with biological systems than with traditional catalysts and petroleum-based building blocks.”

“It has long been recognized that if we could effectively access nature’s full palette of molecules, we could solve many of the world’s most pressing problems,” says Engelmark Cassimjee. “There’s just so much more you can do with biological systems than with traditional catalysts and petroleum-based building blocks. But the key word here is “effectively”, it needs to be as cheap and easy to scale as the chemical solutions we’ve used for more than a century now. We’re the first company to truly address that and by doing so we are building foundational technology for an entire future industry.”

 

Photo of the three founders of EnginZyme, Robin Chatterjee, Karim Engelmark Cassimjee, and Samuel Härgestam. Photographer: Tobias Björkgren

 

 

Facts: Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology is the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purpose (Nature). The field is hot, with many investors and entrepreneurs making comparisons to the dawn of the computer age. This is reflected in the almost 4 billion USD invested in it in 2018 and in the Chemistry Nobel Prize awarded to Professor Frances Arnold in the same year for her work on enxymes.