Almac

The application of biocatalysts in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries continues to grow as it moves from the domain of specialised technology to mainstream methodology – a move that has been facilitated by the increasing commercial “off-the-shelf” availability of biocatalysts at large scale.

Almac has invested extensively into this area due to an increased need for security of supply of biocatalysts for their internal non-GMP and GMP pilot plant and manufacturing projects.  Almac is now making their biocatalysts available to their customers:-

1. A typical “off-the-shelf” enzyme screen and identification of selective enzyme takes 2-3weeks including implementation of the analytical methods.
2. A typical screen is shown below for the stereoselective reduction of the ketone moiety of a beta-keto ester using Almac CREDs.  Both R and S selectivities were achieved with typical ees of greater than 98%.

Upon identification of the selective enzymes, larger amounts of the enzyme can be supplied for development, followed by commercial manufacturing quantities using Almac’s large-scale fermentation equipment. Bioprocess optimisation, including recycle of cofactors, is now comparable with chemistry optimisation regarding complexity and timescales.

Almac carries out wild type microbial screens to identify novel biocatalysts for a given biotransformation and has the expertise to scale these enzymes for customer specific problems using Almac’s micro and molecular biology facility.