Public Funding for Imperagen Limited

There is a global urgency to address the climate emergency and environmental disaster from unsustainable industrial activity. Chemical manufacturing depends on highly polluting petrochemical-based processes that **use** substantial energy, produce toxic waste and are dependent on geopolitically fragile mining for increasingly scarce metallic catalysts. Chemical transformations occur across the chemical industry and are crucial to produce products that we take for granted, but we currently pay a substantial environmental cost. However, there is a natural solution to chemical transformation: enzymes, which are biodegradable molecular scale factories that work at relatively low temperatures and without hazardous chemical solvents. Enzymes are a solution to expand industrial processes in the face of climate change; enzyme-based synthesis technology can sustainably introduce specific chemical modifications into essential chemicals such as pharmaceuticals, materials, and consumer products. The problem is that development of enzymes for a new chemical process is highly complex. Due to the complex molecular structure of an enzyme, finding improvements is like searching for a needle in a haystack; it can be costly, and take years of development, requiring significant labour with highly unpredictable outcomes of success. To meet the market need, Imperagen (a UK based spin-out from The University of Manchester) is developing an ultra-fast enzyme engineering platform, which can rapidly engineer enzymes for existing chemical engineering processes. The company has discovered a new enzyme (IMP023) that can produce an important drug compound used to treat cancer, in just a single chemical reaction. Compared to the standard complex chemical synthesis of the drug, IMP023 can significantly reduce the chemical steps needed, reduce energy requirements, and reduce waste, offering a much more sustainable route to manufacture of this valuable compound. IMP023 represents a major new multi-million pound commercial opportunity for the company if successfully deployed. The discovery of IMP023 is extremely exciting but is not yet suitable for manufacturing at scale. In this project we aim to create completely new capabilities for our company's unique enzyme engineering platform to improve process performance of IMP023 and other enzymes making them suitable for manufacturing. And finally, we will demonstrate the enzyme can produce the compound in an industrial setting with the aim bringing a new enzyme bioprocess to market, enabling more sustainable way of producing a valuable and important medicine.

There is a global urgency to address the climate emergency and the environmental disaster from unsustainable industrial activity. Chemical manufacturing depends on highly polluting petrochemical-based processes that use substantial energy, produce toxic waste and dependant on increasingly scarce metallic catalysts. Chemical modification of compounds that introduces new chemical properties is required across the chemical industry and is critical to produce products that we depend upon due to their valuable properties, but with a substantial environmental cost. There is however, a natural solution. Enzymes are biological molecular scale factories that can perform these chemical modifications but with the advantage of working at low temperatures, mild conditions and biodegradability. Enzymes are one of the key solutions to maintain industrial processes in the face of climate change. Enzyme-based synthesis technology can introduce specific chemical modifications into essential chemicals such as pharmaceuticals, materials and consumer products, but in a sustainable manner. The problem, however, is that development of enzymes for a new chemical process is highly complex. Due to the complex molecular structure of an enzyme, finding improvements is like searching for needle in a haystack. It is costly and takes months of development, requires significant labour with highly unpredictable outcomes of success. To meet the market need, Imperagen (A UK based Spin Out from The University of Manchester) is developing an ultra-fast enzyme engineering platform, which can rapidly re-engineer enzymes for existing chemical engineering processes. This project will be used to develop and adopt a new and significant addition to Imperagen's technology. This breakthrough will dramatically increase its speed, efficiency and throughput of the technology and build an enzyme engineering platform that can deliver down to weeks, not months, allowing us to bring new products to market at a much accelerated and efficient rate. Our proprietary technology presents a huge commercial opportunity if successfully deployed, but at present is limited by key process bottlenecks. Removal of these bottlenecks through this project will be highly challenging and require innovative solutions to be developed. However, successful deployment will enable the realisation of our ultra-fast enzyme engineering platform, opening up new commercial opportunities into multiple high value market sections.