Ingenza has partnered with Oxford-based biotech company HydRegen to develop a more sustainable and cost-effective method for manufacturing amine-based chemicals, eliminating the need for heavy metal catalysts. The company turned to Ingenza to help improve the expression levels of a new candidate biocatalyst, increasing process efficiency and resource use.
HydRegen was established as a spin-out from the University of Oxford in 2020, with the aim of providing a highly efficient and more sustainable biological alternatives to using metal-based catalysts – like platinum, palladium and nickel – for batch or continuous flow chemical
manufacturing. Classical metal-catalysed chemical manufacturing requires extreme heat and pressures to work effectively, and the catalysts themselves can be toxic, requiring extensive, costly downstream purification processes. HydRegen uses a suite of proprietary enzyme technologies to perform reactions at much lower temperatures and pressures, making processes more energy efficient and sustainable while offering significant cost savings.
The company’s latest Bio2Amine candidate for the production of amine-based chemicals was proving difficult to express at a commercial scale, so the team approached Ingenza at the beginning of 2024 to fast-track the enzyme engineering process. Dr Matthew Hodges, COO at HydRegen, explained: "We spoke to several other service providers, but Ingenza really stood out because of its past experience working with hydrogen. The team understood the complexity of the enzyme we were working with, and brought the biology capabilities we needed. Plus, Ingenza’s timescale and affordability struck just the right balance for us."
Dr Holly Reeve, CEO of HydRegen, added: “We were initially only expecting a several-fold increase in enzyme expression levels, but we ended up with a much greater improvement in a very short period of time, and we're really pleased with the results. There’s still a lot of potential for future optimisation through molecular biology and fermentation engineering, and seeing these kinds of improvements early on makes us excited to explore how much further we can go."
Jaymin Amin, Chief Business Officer at Ingenza, said: “We were excited to collaborate with HydRegen to enhance the expression of its proprietary enzymes for biocatalysis. This partnership combines our advanced bio-manufacturing technologies with HydRegen’s pioneering approach to sustainable chemistry, furthering the transition to green manufacturing and reducing the environmental impact of chemical production.”
For more information, visit www.ingenza.com.
About Ingenza
Ingenza is changing the game in product development with its innovative inGenius platform. The platform leverages 12 alternative host systems, customised gene design (codABLE®) and high throughput screening (visABLE®) to develop and optimise bioprocesses for a range of products, from therapeutics to industrial enzymes and consumer goods. By combining DoE and tailored fermentations, the inGenius platform increases predictability to rapidly advance targets to clinical studies and commercialisation. As an engineering biology CRDMO and pipeline accelerator, Ingenza provides
Ingenza announces partnership with Cellugy to investigate the potential of biofabricated cellulose