SBIR Phase I: Enzyme Stabilization via Immobilization for Advanced Chemical Manufacturing

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project enables environmentally sustainable, low-carbon, chemical manufacturing with long-lasting enzymes. The chemicals industry relies heavily on unsustainable petrochemical feedstocks as well as energy and materials inefficient processes. Nature renewably produces a diverse array of chemicals and materials, including lumber from air and sunlight and lifesaving therapeutics like penicillin. Biology creates molecules through the power of enzymes – nature’s catalysts. While some enzymes have been leveraged to produce chemicals, enzymes are typically too short lived and expensive to create scalable, cost-effective chemical manufacturing processes. This project will allow enzymes to gain more share of the $40 billion catalyst space by scaling a patent-pending approach to keep enzymes lasting longer, decreasing their costs significantly. This project will be commercialized as a high-gross margin, recurring revenue business, supporting industrial green chemistry. The first application will be the production of flavors and fragrance molecules, relatively high value molecules that are currently produced in unsustainable, polluting processes. Ultimately, this solution will extend to higher volume, lower value chemicals for larger reductions in environmental pollution. Furthermore, the innovation will contribute to the United States by on-shoring chemical manufacturing processes that left the US due to the high environmental costs. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will demonstrate the commercial feasibility and scalability of heterogeneous polymers to stabilize enzymes through engineered polymer-enzyme interactions. The Phase I research and development builds on the team’s prior work on enzyme stabilization in industrial chemical manufacturing and will develop ultrastable enzymes to reduce the cost of sustainable manufacturing of flavors and fragrances. While this technology has been demonstrated for several early customers at the laboratory scale, a particular focus of this project is the scale up of the manufacturing process. This manufacturing involves state-of-the-art controlled radical polymerization processes that have yet to be commercialized. Traditionally, approaches to sustainable chemical manufacturing struggle with scalability and unit costs, and therefore, this project aims to de-risk scale and cost earlier in commercialization. While this scale-up will be done earlier in commercialization, it is done in collaboration with existing customers to ensure the products at scale provide value to the companies producing fine chemicals. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.