nature's chemistry, working for the planet

EziG, enginzyme's proprietary technology, enables the creation of heterogeneous catalysts by immobilizing enzymes onto a solid, but very porous material. The end result is a powder.

Taking enzymes out of their cellular environment and fixing them onto the EziG material enables the creation of enzymatic cascades in fixed-bed reactors. These are sequences of successive enzymatic reactions where the output of one reaction is used as the input for the next.

The key here is the improvement in enzyme stability, which allows for extensive reusability and much lower operating costs. By using this technology, enginzyme creates bespoke heterogeneous catalysts that are similar to those well-understood in the chemical industry.

A heterogeneous catalyst is a type of catalyst that exists in a different phase (solid, liquid, or gas) than the reactants in a chemical reaction. This distinct phase difference allows the reactants to interact with the catalyst surface where the catalytic reaction occurs.

For example, in a reaction involving gas-phase reactants, a solid catalyst can be used. The reactants adsorb onto the solid surface, react, and then the products desorb, leaving the catalyst surface ready for another cycle.

The key features of heterogeneous catalysts include:

Surface Area: The effectiveness of a heterogeneous catalyst often depends on its surface area. Greater surface area allows more reactant molecules to interact with the catalyst simultaneously, enhancing the reaction rate. EziG is engineered to provide greater surface area when needed — we can create EziG particles of different sizes depending on the reaction we are looking for and the characteristics of the enzyme.

Ease of Separation: Since they are in a different phase, heterogeneous catalysts can be easily separated from the reaction mixture. This is beneficial for industrial processes as it simplifies product purification and catalyst recovery.

Reusability: Heterogeneous catalysts can often be reused or regenerated, which is economically advantageous for industrial processes.

Stability: They are generally more stable than homogeneous catalysts under reaction conditions, which can be important in high-temperature or high-pressure processes.

enginzyme's immobilization technology enables compatibility with most modern infrastructure. This facilitates easy and reliable production scale-up. The application of flow chemistry offers benefits like higher throughput, improved quality, and lower energy consumption​​.

Enginzyme does much more than create high-performance catalysts. We evaluate and design complete processes from starting raw material to target product, taking into account reaction and downstream engineering, process modeling and simulation, techno-economic evaluation, as well as validating the feasibility of the process at laboratory and pilot scale. The process engineering team works closely with the enzyme engineering and catalyst development teams to avoid unnecessary iterations and achieve the most economical result. Designing with the final commercial product in mind streamlines scale-up and mitigates risk.

We use a process-development methodology called front-end loading, which means the process engineering team gets involved early and often. It also means we find out if a project is going to be technically feasible and economically viable before we invest a lot of cash and resources. What is more, this method helps us set process performance targets throughout the different stages of process development and implementation.

We develop the process in-house at laboratory scale, then once we determine that we have a process that works and meets the performance targets we set, we can transfer that technology to a piloting partner — a contract manufacturer, or CMO, to begin a piloting campaign to generate sufficient information required for a plant design, and deliver product samples to interested customers.

All four of our R&D teams are on the same floor, so there is a continuous feedback loop that all the teams benefit from, and that means we get from idea to prototype much more quickly than a bigger company would.

The Data and Automation Team is everywhere, all the time. They create the infrastructure that enables our researchers to use the most modern techniques in data science, data engineering, and AI. And they provide the tools (and encouragement) for researchers to easily drop data into a “bucket” so it can be organized, modeled, and used to train AI.

“We make our researchers' life in the lab more joyful,” says Nadim Morhell, head of lab automation and data management. “Logging everything that is happening in the lab is very tedious for the researcher. We eliminate the hours (or days) it used to take them to write reports. We give them more time to do the fun work.”

One of enginzyme’s secret productivity weapons is its full embrace of mechatronics engineering, the MacGyver-like combination of mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, and software engineering that is the key to our agility and efficiency.

When an off-the-shelf product isn’t quite up to the task, or there is no product for sale that does what we have in mind, our mechatronics engineers get to work: They can create a custom machine completely from scratch, or add new hardware or software to existing gear. For example, giving a machine “eyes” by adding a camera and some basic computer vision software.

The Process Development team and the Biocatalysis engineers can draw up specs for a bench-top “flow rig,” a miniature version of the kind of multi-reactor factory that would be used in production, and the mechatronics team will build it right here in our Stockholm headquarters, making adjustments on the fly based on observations from their colleagues, the end-users, on how it could be better. There isn’t an equipment maker in the world that can operate with such flexibility.

Machines like these enable our scientists to test and optimize quickly. They are sophisticated and custom made, but not prohibitively expensive, since they are built in-house. They produce reams and reams of data on all of the experiments run on them, which is automatically saved to our cloud databases with a structure that resembles our R&D semantics, so that the data can naturally be used later to model how different catalysts perform under various conditions.

With the crew we have running data and automation, combined with the makers on the mechatronics team, our scientists can focus on creativity, innovation, and the big picture.