Axial: https://linktr.ee/axialxyz
Axial partners with great founders and inventors. We invest in early-stage life sciences companies such as Appia Bio, Seranova Bio, Delix Therapeutics, Simcha Therapeutics, among others often when they are no more than an idea. We are fanatical about helping the rare inventor who is compelled to build their own enduring business. If you or someone you know has a great idea or company in life sciences, Axial would be excited to get to know you and possibly invest in your vision and company . We are excited to be in business with you - email us at info@axialvc.com
Industrial enzymes
Enzymes are the workhorses of the cell and a core part of industrial biotechnology. The thesis is to collapse supply chains with biology. And enzymes are uniquely suited to do this. They catalyze important chemical reactions to produce new products from detergents to specialty chemicals. Overall, the field has undergone roughly 4 eras:
Enzymes from animal sources - early 1900s
Enzymes from microbial sources - mid 1900s
Enzymes from genetic engineering - 1980s to now (Novozymes has been dominant here)
Enzymes from software - now (Aperiam Bio leading the way)
The industrial enzyme market started taking off in the 1960s with what would become Novozymes starting work in the 1940s among other companies. In the 1980s, in the backdrop of the biotechnology revolution, companies like Genentech with Genencor (now part of DuPont), Novozymes, and Genex started using cloning and genetic engineering on bacterial/fungal strains to start producing enzymes with higher yields and new functions. Genencor in particular did great work to bring new enzymes to products like Tide and ethanol. The workhorse for this period of growth was the host, bacterial or fungal, and deep-tank, fed-batch aerobic fermentation. On this, there is a large opportunity to pick different hosts specific for a given problem. Colorado Biofactory is leading the way here.
With applications from food and plastics to energy and textiles, the addressable market for enzymes is in the $10Bs. The key theme for enzymes is replacing organic chemistry. Organic synthesis often leads to environmentally-harmful byproducts but have logical steps to produce a target molecule. Whereas enzymes are useful to produce a natural reaction/product but are not characterized well enough to significantly eat away at organic chemistry’s use. This creates an opportunity to go through the large search space of enzymes and the reactions they catalyze to map out specificity, catalytic rate, and activity. A database of millions of these enzymes along with these features could create the standard. This would enable logical steps to use enzymatic reactions to produce a target molecule.
Bringing more engineering principles to this field is an important driver. Synthetic biology and new tools can build large libraries of enzymes and screen for functional variants. The key themes here are:
Standardization of parts – makes screening and discovery reproducible and scalable
Coupling screening to the synthesis and assembly of DNA
Modularity of parts between multiple chassis
More predictable outcomes – as more data is collected through screens various combinations of components will be discovered to work together
These principles create a tight feedback loop between new models and biology experiments to make novel predictions. As more experiments are conducted, a company can build a large knowledge base of what experiments not to do and reduce the search space to valuable enzymes with new functionality.
Successful case studies like Novozymes, Solugen, and Genencor initially pursued low-hanging fruit and expanded their platform to solve larger-and-harder problems. BluumBio and Rubi Laboratories among others are emerging companies to keep an eye on. Broadly, applications for industrial enzymes span drug development, consumer products, and industrials. Software unlocking new enzymes through better genomics analysis (finding new biosynthetic clusters) and design can discover enzymes that catalyze difficult chemistries (i.e. C-C) and expand the toolkit to help patients and our environment.