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Cyberport incubatee accelerates enzyme design with supercomputers

To most people who are unfamiliar with enzymes, these wonderful biological molecules are essential to life and to many industries that depend on enzymes for their products and production processes.

 

For example, while naturally produced enzymes can build muscles, destroy toxins, and aid digestion, industrially produced enzymes can be used to produce antibiotics, increase the shelf life and nutritional value of food, make beer with consistent quality, improve fabric finishing, and create detergents.

 

Although enzymes can be designed and engineered, traditional protein engineering methods, such as gene shuffling, require extensive labour and long research time. Even so, the screening of beneficial mutant enzymes is often fraught with variables and the success rates are low. 

 

Enzyme Design, a biotech start-up from Cyberport , specialises in improving the protein engineering process by building the structural model of any protein computationally.

 

By leveraging the team’s knowledge of protein structures and enzyme properties, tapping modern computational chemistry and bioinformatics, and harnessing the power of supercomputers, Enzyme Design can simulate every possible mutation in a protein and identify the most beneficial mutant enzyme in months instead of years. This process cuts down the research time and labour usually required and achieves a much higher success rate.

 

Industrial production of enzymes is also positive to society. It is cleaner and safer than the chemical production of enzymes, because the process does not involve organic solvents. Consequently, the wastes are easier to process, and the storage of chemicals is risk-free.

 

Enzyme Design is collaborating with other biotech companies in Hong Kong, such as GeneHarbor Biotechnologies, Hong Kong’s largest enzyme company, and is eyeing other collaboration opportunities in the Greater Bay Area.