REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Researchers at Codexis, Inc., a private biotechnology company, today announced publication of a paper in Nature Biotechnology describing development of a custom biocatalyst which showed a 4000-fold productivity increase over the natural enzyme. The resulting biocatalyst is used to manufacture a key building block of atorvastatin, the active ingredient in the world’s largest-selling drug to lower cholesterol. The paper will be published in the journal’s March 7 issue, and appeared this week on the journal’s website (www.nature.com/nbt).
“Faced with a need to improve manufacturing processes, the pharmaceutical industry is increasingly turning to the use of biocatalysts, or enzymes, to enhance manufacturing efficiency and reduce environmental waste,” said John Grate, Ph.D., Codexis Senior Vice President, R&D and Chief Technology Officer. “Historically, biocatalysts have been viewed as a limited option for commercial manufacturing. This was due to the typically low productivity of most available naturally-occurring enzymes.”
“This is changing, as the technology has advanced for creating customized biocatalysts which improve on what is available from nature,” Dr. Grate added. “In this study, Codexis researchers showed that we can substantially accelerate development of customized biocatalysts with greatly increased productivity, which can enable new, more efficient pharmaceutical chemical manufacturing processes.”
The Codexis research team was led by Gjalt Huisman, Ph.D., Vice President, R&D Project Development & Management, Pharmaceutical Chemicals. The team applied proprietary bioinformatics software to model relationships between protein sequence and protein activity (ProSAR) and used this information to guide the optimization of the custom biocatalyst using Codexis’ directed molecular evolution technology.
“From a process economics and operability perspective, the productivity of the custom biocatalyst required a 4000-fold improvement compared to the natural enzyme. Preexisting enzyme optimization methods, including Codexis’ own proprietary conventional DNA shuffling, were inadequate, but with Codexis’ innovative ProSAR-driven directed evolution approach, as described in this paper, we were able to reach this target,” Dr. Huisman said.
The article is titled, “Improving catalytic function by ProSAR-driven enzyme evolution.” Codexis won a 2006 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the manufacturing process resulting from this research.
Codexis is a leading developer of biocatalytic process technologies that can substantially reduce manufacturing costs across a broad range of industries. Codexis’ proprietary directed evolution technologies enable novel, cost-effective and environmentally friendly processes for pharmaceutical, energy and industrial product applications. Codexis has partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies worldwide where its technology is now in use. The company began operations in 2002. Codexis is a registered trademark of Codexis, Inc. For more information, please visit www.codexis.com.
Contact: Justin Jackson, jjackson@burnsmc.com or Tricia Morsch, tmorsch@burnsmc.com of Burns McClellan, 212-213-0006, or Lyn Christenson, Codexis, lyn.christenson@codexis.com, 650-298-5368.
Codexis, Inc.
CONTACT: Justin Jackson, jjackson@burnsmc.com or Tricia Morsch,tmorsch@burnsmc.com, both of Burns McClellan, +1-212-213-0006; or LynChristenson of Codexis, +1-650-298-5368, or lyn.christenson@codexis.com
Web site: http://www.codexis.com/
