Bulk CMO

History of enzyme production at Prozomix

The early strategy (2008-2015) of Prozomix was to build the largest and most diverse Biocatalysis Enzyme Toolkit available, thus affording our customers maximum probability of obtaining a satisfactory hit against their intended novel application, enabling them to establish bioprocesses instead of relying solely on traditional synthetic chemistry.  Under this initial strategy, customers had the right, as they still do today, to produce any hit enzyme in-house themselves, or via any third-party CMO of their choice.  Surprisingly, after rolling out the Toolkit to bigpharma, it became almost immediately apparent that this sector risks losing early-stage bioprocesses if it can’t access multi-kg quantities of novel hits in some cases literally within a few weeks.   Prozomix thus quickly pivoted in response and installed a Pilot Plant (750 L) that became operational in 2017.  After a short period, however, through a mix of Commercial Manufacturing campaigns and continuous orders for bulk enzyme in the kg to 10s kg range, it became clear that to best serve our growing bigpharma customer base, we were going to need to scale-up further, and install a Production Plant.

Work began towards this end in 2019 by purchasing a factory site here in Haltwhistle, and today we are nearing completion of this significant endeavour.  This new facility will operate as 3 x 2400 L vessels, affording both scale and flexibility to our customers, with fully operational status expected by mid-2024.

Our strong reputation today

After more than 400 fermentation runs as of early 2024, Prozomix has built a strong global reputation in the area of manufacturing and optimising novel enzymes for key early stage bioprocesses, and now acts as not just a CMO for enzymes discovered from our Biocatalysis Enzyme Toolkit, though we certainly do plenty such business, but also for any enzyme of interest to our customers, and have at this stage scaled the production of all common classes of biocataysis enzymes.

Advantages of Prozomix as your preferred CMO

Furthermore, our new Production Plant was designed with manufacturing efficiency in mind, whilst maintaining highest quality enzyme powders, to enable Prozomix to yet further de-risk your nascent bioprocesses, by over-producing your immediate requirement, with storage of the excess material as a dedicated LOT for your potential future requirements (and wholly at our expense/risk).  Such powders are stable at -20°C for probably 100 years, and while immediately this may instinctively feel to some a little wasteful, our experience of bigpharma demands for such materials strongly suggests the opposite is true, where more frequently than not, multiple quantities at or around the 1 kg mark are requested, yet as individual events.  Thus given the efficiencies of scale, it is much better for our customers, ourselves and the environment, that a single larger production run is performed, followed by storage of excess!  Needless to say, from all perspectives there is probably nothing better than getting a lead-time of just 2 days for 1-10 kg of a speciality enzyme powder, and for that to be from the same LOT as already purchased, some would say priceless!

A further notable advantage of using Prozomix as a CMO is that we have commoditised the price of the high-quality and stable enzyme powders we produce, either for hits from our Biocatalysis Enzyme Toolkit, or a biocatalyst discovered by the customer, that means all our customers all over the world pay the same price and no negotiation is required.  It also means you know the cost of scaling your bioprocess at all stages of its development.  We also linked our prices to the USA Retail Prices Index back in 2015, and thus we will never ramp our pricing, as we can’t:

PRICE LIST (in USD)

AS HIGH QUALITY CRUDE POWDER

100 mg free-of-charge

1 g = 340

10 g = 575

100 g = 3850

1 kg = 17050

10 kg= 55000

100 kg = 165000

(back to Services)

Yes, we have perfected the production of highest-titre enzyme powders that are all preserved by freeze-drying, followed by packaging in robust shipping materials, meaning that we can ship them at ambient temperatures worldwide, and for free, reducing risk to your bioprocess caused by chilling issues that can happen for a multitude of reasons that are out of both your and our control!!!