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Biocatalysis in the pharmaceutical industry - chemistry for tomorrow’s earth

Date
April 12, 2021

The growing structural complexity of modern drug molecules demands innovation and excellence in organic synthesis. Enzymes react with unparalleled specificity and build molecular architectures in short order. As a result, innovation in biocatalytic methods has the transformative potential to enable more efficient, economical, and environmentally benign routes to novel therapeutic candidates [1].
In recent years, the progress in molecular biology and computational methods combined with the ubiquitous availability of genomic information allows us to identify new biotransformations at an unprecedented speed. At the same time, advances in directed evolution techniques facilitate the rapid engineering of the enzymes to act on unnatural molecules, such as pharmaceuticals.
Here, we will discuss how biotransformations can accelerate the pace of drug discovery and manufacture: from small-molecules [2–4] to novel modalities, such as therapeutic proteins [5]. This talk will showcase how we can efficiently combine multiple enzyme-catalyzed reactions into one-pot cascades [2] to significantly reduce the step-count and the number of isolations.
We envision a greater adoption of biocatalysis to access complex non-natural molecules will pave the way for a fundamentally novel synthetic design and sustainable chemistry [1].

Presenter

Speaker Image for Anna Fryszkowska
Principal Scientist, Merck 7 Co., Inc.

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