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Quantumzyme, a biotransformation company that is focused on clean and green chemistry, has a pipeline of 10-12 molecules that they intend to launch in the next three years. The company has a customer-centered research work idea that enhances enzyme activity, selectivity, and specificity using cutting-edge quantum mechanics, molecular modelling, and engineering methodologies.
"Out of those, two are already in the final stages of commercialisation. We expect these to be available in the market by the first quarter of the next calendar year. We are in the process of filing relevant IP and scale up activities are in progress with a few select partners. Currently both are in the pharmaceutical API industry and expected to have a big impact in both cost savings as well as greener method of eliminating the usage of harmful metal catalysts in the manufacturing of these APIs," said Naveen Kulkarni, CEO, Quantumzyme.
"Investment is primarily to build an integrated, collaborative R&D facility in-house bringing both insilico and invitro under the same roof as well as some basic chemistry and analytical chemistry. The cost of the facility is expected to be around ?20 crore. We have recently established our USA operations and present through our partners in Europe and Japan and are working with customers in these geographies. Apart from these, Quantumzyme is also expanding the scope of offerings and capabilities which started as an insilico, computational solutions, contract research has now built capabilities to offer clone and express the desired enzymes, screen for potential candidates, assay design and development for “greening” the chemical reactions and pilot scale capabilities for initial proof-of-concept where in we are now capable of sending gram scale enzymes for in-house testing for our customers. Expansion of our capabilities to provide integrated solutions even in analytical chemistry and kilogram scale pilot facility is in the works now", he further said.
"Quantumzyme’s advantage is that we do most of the critical problem solving computationally; be it computational chemistry or computational biology. Although the computational infrastructure is not negligible, the speed is incomparable with the traditional approaches of mutagenesis, enzyme evolution which takes months if not years. The other challenge is there are many nonsense mutations without any significance or role in the catalysis. Our mutants are typically just one or two amino acid residues and has given more than 100 to 500 fold improvement in many cases. This is because we can “see” reactions happening in our simulations and precisely understand the barriers at quantum level and have developed techniques to overcome them" he added.
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