Enzymit Inc., a syn-bio production platform company, today announced the close of a $5 million seed round. The company is creating a new computational design platform based on what it terms ‘enzymatic manufacturing’, which it claims is superior to traditional biomanufacturing techniques utilizing fermentation.
In biomanufacturing industries such as alternative protein, precision fermentation utilizes microbes to act as cell factories to create new and novel products. The microbes are computationally programmed to express these products, but according to Enzymit these expressions often also result in toxins or are not highly productive due to their complexity. Enzymit’s solution involves designing what it calls ‘new-to-nature enzymes’ and using them in what the company describes as a ‘cell-free’ system. According to Enzymit, this avoids the difficulties related to cell-based manufacturing through fermentation.
The company’s computational enzyme design platform utilizes AI to process what it claims are billions of different enzyme structures. An enzyme’s structure defines its function, and Enzymit claims that its AI-driven process will allow it to unlock new functions at a much lower cost than traditional protein sequence research techniques.
“While there is no dispute that humanity’s future relies on biomanufacturing, if we expect to maintain our standard of living in the face of increasing global pressures and growing population, nature hasn’t supplied us with all of the enzymes humanity needs,” said CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Gideon Lapidoth in the release. “This is the bottleneck Enzymit aims to solve.”
According to the company, one of the first applications of its enzymatic manufacturing platform is to develop a novel process for manufacturing allulose, a calorie-free sugar substitute.
