Quantumzyme gets patent for development of green catalyst in India

Quantumzyme, a biotransformation company, focused on clean and green chemistry has recently been granted a patent for the transaminase enzyme by applying its technology QZyme Workbench in India. The patent was granted for creating a green catalyst for one of the world’s most significant chemical reactions, which can be useful for pharma and agricultural industries. The QZyme Workbench technology can handle a wide range of aspects of protein modeling and engineering, including structural refinement, ligand docking, conformational sampling, estimating substrate binding affinity, modeling catalytic reactions, identifying mutable hotspots, and further hotspot optimisation.

With diabetes quickly becoming a lifestyle disease in India, with over 74 million active patients and a big community that remains undiagnosed. The introduction of more affordable drugs is expected to increase volumes due to improved accessibility. Sitagliptin (Januvia) had its last days in India in the year 2022 and while Sitagliptin is a newer molecule to the Indian market, the cost of therapy is anticipated to fall from Rs 45 per day charged by Merck to Rs 8-18 per day charged by generic competitors.

Naveen Kulkarni, CEO, Quantumzyme reports, “Given the current patent and trademark landscape, this is crucial and encouraging for our company. We only hope to create more resourceful green catalysts and develop better technologies to justify our work as a company to provide more efficiently to the industries in need.”

A company release said, “Quantumzyme discovered and optimised a new biocatalytic synthetic route for enantiopure chiral amine, a critical intermediate in the synthesis of Sitagliptin. This approach offers significant benefits to Indian generic players by reducing their dependency on China, where the key intermediate is currently imported, and by making the key intermediate available locally at competitive prices, enabling generic players to reduce costs significantly and make the drug more affordable, where the key intermediate is currently imported; second, the key intermediate will be made available locally at competitive prices, allowing generic players to significantly reduce costs and make the drug affordable. Transaminase reactions have a crucial role to play in the API and fertilizer/agriculture industries by providing a means to efficiently produce essential molecules such as chiral amines and amino acids. The technology has the potential to enhance plant growth and yield by synthesizing amino acid-based plant growth regulators.

Because of its essential synthesis from sustainable sources, advances in green chemistry are inextricably linked to biocatalysts. Green catalysts have the ability to catalyze various chemical reactions, making them an important option to environmentally hazardous chemical mechanisms.