The groundbreaking QZyme Workbench technology is used in pharma sector
Bengaluru-based Quantumzyme, a biotransformation company, focussed on clean and green chemistry has recently been granted a patent for the transaminase enzyme by applying its revolutionary technology QZyme Workbench in India. The patent was granted for creating a green catalyst for one of the world’s most significant chemical reactions, which can be useful for pharmaceutical and agricultural industries.
The groundbreaking QZyme Workbench technology can handle a wide range of important aspects of protein modelling and engineering, including structural refinement, ligand docking, conformational sampling, estimating substrate binding affinity, modelling catalytic reactions, identifying mutable hotspots, and further hotspot optimisation.
Diabetes quickly becoming a lifestyle disease in India, with over 74 million active patients and a big community that remains undiagnosed. The introduction of more affordable drugs is expected to increase volumes due to improved accessibility. Sitagliptin (Januvia) had its last days in India in the year 2022 and while Sitagliptin is a newer molecule to the Indian market, the cost of therapy is anticipated to fall from Rs. 45 per day charged by Merck to Rs. 8-18 per day charged by generic competitors.
Naveen Kulkarni, CEO, Quantumzyme reports, “Given the current patent and trademark landscape, this is crucial and encouraging for our company. We only hope to create more resourceful green catalysts and develop better technologies to justify our work as a company to provide more efficiently to the industries in need.”
Quantumzyme discovered and optimized a new biocatalytic synthetic route for enantiopure chiral amine, a critical intermediate in the synthesis of Sitagliptin. This approach offers significant benefits to Indian generic players by reducing their dependency on China, where the key intermediate is currently imported, and by making the key intermediate available locally at competitive prices, enabling generic players to reduce costs significantly and make the drug more affordable, where the key intermediate is currently imported; second, the key intermediate will be made available locally at competitive prices, allowing generic players to significantly reduce costs and make the drug affordable. Transaminase reactions have a crucial role to play in the API and fertiliser/agriculture industries by providing a means to efficiently produce essential molecules such as chiral amines and amino acids. The technology has the potential to enhance plant growth and yield by synthesising amino acid-based plant growth regulators.
