BioCat Collective

Educating and Building a Broader Biocatalysis Community

Discover Innovative Advances in Biocatalysis

Explore curated insights highlighting breakthroughs and industrial applications of biocatalysis that drive innovation and efficiency.

Enhanced Enzymatic Efficiency

Improves reaction specificity and speed, enabling more sustainable and cost-effective industrial processes.

Scalable Production Techniques

Demonstrates methods to scale biocatalytic reactions from lab to industry, ensuring consistent product quality.

Broadened Substrate Range

Expands the variety of chemical substrates biocatalysts can effectively convert, increasing versatility.

Chemical Reviews: Biocatalysis in Industry

Enzymes can be engineered to catalyze reactions of interest with high proficiency and exquisite selectivity. These catalysts can be used in living organisms, in specialized reactors, or in combination with other catalysts in vitro to greatly augment their utility. Together, these approaches allow for production of a wide range of chemicals and form the basis of many industrial biocatalytic processes. 

Enzymatic Bioconjugation: A Perspective from the Pharmaceutical Industry

Enzymes have firmly established themselves as bespoke catalysts for small molecule transformations in the pharmaceutical industry, from early research and development stages to large-scale production. In principle, their exquisite selectivity and rate acceleration can also be leveraged for modifying macromolecules to form bioconjugates. However, available catalysts face stiff competition from other bioorthogonal chemistries. In this Perspective, we seek to illuminate applications of enzymatic bioconjugation in the face of an expanding palette of new drug modalities. With these applications, we wish to highlight some examples of current successes and pitfalls of using enzymes for bioconjugation along the pipeline and try to illustrate opportunities for further development.