Small-scale CMO

Small-scale production strategy

In 2008 Prozomix was founded as a pure Enzyme Discovery play, and thus established an optimised small-scale enzyme production facility as first priority. This initial production lab comprised standard refrigerated orbital shakers, sonicators, centrifuges and freeze-driers. After a few years, our Biocatalysis Enzyme Toolkit concept, where large numbers of relevant novel enzymes were assembled in free-to-screen panels, was being very well received by the global pharmaceutical market, with the numbers of customers and orders growing well. At this stage, in 2014, it became necessary to increase small-scale (up to 100s g) enzyme production capacity. A small 20 L fermenter was installed for this purpose, but through working closely with our bigpharma customers, it was clear that the key priority was simply to provide a larger quantity of exactly the same quality material. There was also concern from our customers that (1) scale-up issues may be experienced if production switched from flasks to a fermenter, (2) lengthy fermentation development work would be required and (3) costs would increase. Thus to allay these significant concerns for scaled-hit requests from bigpharma, we opted to scale-out our flask production capacity, by acquiring large capacity New Brunswick Scientific 3 tier shakers, with combined shaking capacity of 600 x 2 L flasks, along with commensurate floor-standing Sorvall centrifuge capacity, all in a new larger laboratory environment termed our “Flask Lab”.

Small-scale production today

The new Flask Lab, currently with a capacity of 200 enzymes per day at 2 g crude powder scale, has served two purposes ever since, firstly it services the wishes of bigpharma perfectly, enabling multiple 100s g requests to be satisfied simultaneously, whilst also allowing, for example, all 96 enzymes from a particular panel to be produced at the same time thus maximising quality, reproducibility and efficiency. Indeed, some customers who experienced scale-up issues historically, requested 1 kg batches of their hits to be produced in flasks! It was actually because of such conservative behaviour that we spent some time perfecting a fermentation medium, termed TB++, that we use not only for flask-scale production, but also as the base medium for our 750 L Pilot Plant. That effort was well spent, because as predicted, fermentation development work is simply now not required when scaling from 1 L to 500 L, SDS-PAGE analysis looks identical, and not a single background metabolite/enzyme difference has been reported for any scaled batch as compared to the reference flask material. Today our regular customers simply order kgs quantities of any enzyme of interest without thinking twice about any potential scale-up concerns!

Our leading reputation

After more than 10000 in-house novel recombinant enzyme expressions, predominantly from genes discovered via our metagenomics adventures, in addition to many re-productions of Biocatalysis Enzyme Toolkit panels, our customers have grown so used to the rapid turnaround times and best in class quality of the powders supplied, that many have also elected to use Prozomix as small-scale CMO for their own enzyme panels. We are very proud to have been selected for such a critical task, where respective plasmids are stored at Prozomix, enabling instant re-transformation and production of their hits within days, and shipping these days within a week of request up to 1 kg of dry crude powder.

Prozomix as CMO to produce your enzyme panel

WHEN? – where you have constructed your own expression constructs and wish to have high quality enzyme powders manufactured from them!

(please NOTE – this service is not available for plasmids carrying beta-lactamase markers.  If this is the case, the enzyme encoding genes should be sub-cloned into an alternative plasmid, please talk to us, this is something we may be able to assist you with)

HOW? – you supply your plasmids in tube or plate format, then within 7 days from arrival at Prozomix, the enzymes are produced, packaged as desired (generally in 1 mg / well  format along with 1 g vials of powder), and shipped!

Why trust Prozomix with your small-scale enzyme manufacturing?

• performed on a “no enzyme, no fee” basis
• very rapid, material produced and shipped within 7 days of plasmid arrival at Prozomix
• very experienced over all classes of biocatalysis enzyme, with class-specific cofactor supplementations offered at no extra cost
• we are frequently told quality is best available
• we are frequently told price is incredible (standard global commoditised price list – below)
• we are trusted by the largest bigpharma players (we understand and respect your sequence space, its what we do)
• we will hold your plasmids at no cost
• we will hold your reference materials at no cost and will hit or exceed their quality for further quantities ordered
• we ship everything as stabilised freeze dried powders free-of-charge globally

As mentioned above, a further notable advantage of using Prozomix as a small-scale 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 as here, 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

0.1 g = generally as free samples (situational)

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!!!