Industrial Enzymes : Nature's Solution to PFAS Remediation
With applications from food and plastics to energy and textiles, the addressable market for enzymes is in the $10Bs. The key theme for enzymes is replacing organic chemistry. Organic synthesis often leads to environmentally-harmful byproducts but has logical steps to produce a target molecule. Whereas enzymes are useful to produce a natural reaction/product but are not characterized well enough to significantly eat away at organic chemistry’s use. This creates an opportunity to go through the large search space of enzymes and the reactions they catalyze to map out specificity, catalytic rate, and activity. A database of millions of these enzymes along with these features could create the standard. This would enable logical steps to use enzymatic reactions to produce a target molecule.
Joshua Elkington on New Frontiers in Life Sciences: Industrial Enzymes
With advances in Synthetic Biology, Metagenomic Databases, AI, and Machine Learning, industrial enzyme development has evolved into what Joshua Elkington refers to as the "Enzymes from Software” stage.
In fact, these “enzymes from software” constitute the core technology behind the recent PFAS remediation partnership announced between Aether Biomachines ( Good AI’s portfolio ) and Allonnia.
Through its initial indexing, Aether has successfully identified dozens of de-fluorination reaction types, paving the way for developing the target enzymes that could break the strong C-F bonds ( Carbon-Fluorine bonds ) found in PFAS.
With the water remediation technology expenditures forecasted at $6.15 billion for this decade, Aether’s novel enzyme degradation solution is poised to capture a large portion of the market.
PFAS remediation will become the next billion-dollar frontier for synthetic biology!