SBIR Phase I: Improving food safety using hyper-stable enzyme cleaning products

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be to improve food safety by integrating hyper-stable enzymes into cleaning products. Industrial enzymes are a growing, multi-billion dollar green industry that reduces energy, water, and harsh chemical use while improving process efficiency in many sectors. Despite the broad use and success of industrial enzymes, their application and economic impact has been severely limited by the narrow thermal and chemical operational ranges available. The goals of this project are to develop a new enzyme platform that allows production of enzymes with greatly increased thermal and acid stability, allowing these enzymes to be applied in industries that have not previously been accessible to enzymes. The initial target market is the dairy cleaning market, where these superior products have the potential to increase production due to faster cleaning, better removal of protein contaminants and biofilms, reduced water use, prevention of food borne illnesses, and improved food hygiene. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to use a unique hyperstable enzyme production platform to generate enzymes for commercial use in dairy cleaning applications. Although the genes from extreme organisms have been studied for over forty years, much of their commercial potential has not been captured due to their incompatibility with traditional protein expression systems. The hyperstability of our enzymes allows them to work with hot, acidic, detergent cleaning steps to more effectively remove biomolecules and biofilm contaminants from food processing equipment. The plan is to test these enzyme formulations on laboratory and real world samples from local dairies and determine their efficacy to clean membranes and to remove biomolecule and biofilm contaminants. The project also aims to optimize the enzyme production platform to improve profit margins. By applying extreme enzymes to cleaning dairy processing facilities, this project will demonstrate the power of biodegradable enzymes to improve food safety by providing superior cleaning in less time while using less water and fewer harsh chemicals.