Why did we invest? — Kcat Enzymatic

Industrial production has undergone rapid changes in the last few centuries. With the advancement in technology and the rate of growth achieved through the industrial revolution, we have always been on the lookout for ways to increase production. For example, the use of chemical APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) in medicine dates back to the 19th century. This marked the beginning of the era of synthetic drugs, which replaced traditional medicines derived from natural sources such as plants and animals.

However, the use of chemical APIs has also raised concerns about their environmental impact and the potential for side effects and drug resistance. As industries continue to develop and grow, finding efficient and sustainable methods of production becomes increasingly important. One such method involves the use of biocatalysts, or enzymes, in industrial production processes. Enzymes offer a range of advantages over traditional chemical APIs, including greater specificity, higher yields, and reduced environmental impact. This is where Kcat Enzymatic comes into the picture!

Kcat Enzymatic is an enzyme/protein engineering group that specializes in providing optimized enzymes for industrial applications. These enzymes are engineered by using their enzyme discovery platform based on proprietary algorithms to examine and derive focused libraries of enzymes with desired properties.

The global enzymes market size was valued at USD 10.69 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.5% from 2021 to 2028. Out of this, the global technical enzymes market size is projected to grow from USD 1.1 billion in 2019 to USD 1.5 billion by 2026. The increasing trend of environmental concerns in developing countries and advancements of R&D activities for technical enzymes are the major factors that are projected to drive the growth of this market during the forecast period.

Directed evolution is a bioengineering method for creating new and better enzymes in the laboratory using the principles of evolution. To engineer enzymes, we need to efficiently screen mutant libraries for which a high-throughput screening system is crucial. Also it relies on random mutations and screening, which can be time-consuming and may not yield the desired results. However, combining enzyme engineering approaches and machine learning methods have demonstrated to be an efficient strategy to optimize enzyme properties.

• Data-driven methods can aid the efficient navigation through the enormous sequence space by training enzyme-specific functions that help to guide the evolution of enzymes using variant information obtained by sequencing.
• For the success of finding sequence-function relationships with improved properties, ML methods require good information content in terms of quality and quantity and likewise, model uncertainty has a strong impact on the success of such campaigns

Kcat Enzymatic uses a proprietary developed 7D Grid Technology — A technology that uses Quantum Beads and Artificial Intelligence for Engineering & Optimizing Enzymes — which was recognized as one of “Novel Tools for Enzyme Engineering” in 2019 by Enzyme Engineering Consortium.

High dimensional data from computational/wet lab experiments are fed into AL/ML algorithms for training and to get a focused library of enzymes with minimal false positives. The technology moves drug discovery programs forward in months not years and does it at a fraction of the cost it takes through traditional methods.

Over the past 4 years, Kcat Enzymatic has developed nearly 6000 enzymes of different classes in their lab. These enzymes are now being used across industries such as pharmaceutics, cosmetics, petroleum, and textiles to name a few. They have filed for 10 patents so far with their work getting published in close to 20 international publications in the field of biology and technology.

The team at Kcat Enzymatic is a good mix of individuals from biology and technology backgrounds. Mr. Gladstone who is the CEO is an M.Tech who specializes in artificial intelligence and has developed the algorithms which are used by the Kcat Enzymatic platform. Dr. Pravin Kumar is the Chief Scientific Officer and comes with more than 18 years of experience in computational biology. Dr. Roopa Lalitha is a biochemist and the Chief IP Officer having more than 15 years of experience in computational Biology Between the three of them, we found the perfect balance between strategy and execution, strong technical expertise, and the build-against-all-odds mindset required to build a startup in this space.

We at Ideaspring Capital are very excited to partner with Glad, Pravin, Roopa, and the Kcat Enzymatic team, to optimize enzymes for industrial applications thereby improving efficiency, saving costs, and benefitting the environment.