Enzymes—nature’s own catalysts—are being redesigned from scratch in a new international centre, bypassing the slow, costly process of evolving them in the lab. The problem is that natural enzymes rarely work well for industrial chemistry. To make them useful, researchers typically use directed evolution, a technique that mutates enzymes over many generations to improve their performance. But this requires expensive, specialised equipment and can take months or years. Worse, for many chemical reactions—such as those used to make novel pharmaceuticals or break down persistent pollutants—no natural enzyme exists to start with. The International Centre for Enzyme Design (ICED) aims to solve both problems by combining deep-learning protein design tools with advanced experimental methods, allowing researchers to predict and build custom enzymes from scratch, with specific activities. If successful, ICED could transform how the chemical and pharmaceutical industries operate. Instead of relying on energy-intensive, wasteful chemical processes, manufacturers could switch to enzymes that work at room temperature, are biodegradable, and come from renewable feedstocks. This would directly affect the production of medicines, agrochemicals, and recycled plastics, and could make carbon capture from the atmosphere more efficient. The centre’s work is applied from the start, targeting real industrial needs.
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Biocatalysis is a sustainable technology that harnesses the power of Nature's catalysts, known as enzymes, to perform chemical reactions. Enzymes are inexpensive, biodegradable, produced from renewable feedstocks, operate under environmentally benign reaction conditions and speed up chemical processes with remarkable efficiency and selectivity. For these reasons, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries routinely use certain classes of enzymes in commercial manufacturing processes to replace chemical transformations that are inefficient and/or have a high environmental burden. For example, engineered enzymes are now used to produce pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals, recycle plastics and capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus contributing to a more efficient and sustainable chemical industry. However, enzymes found in Nature are usually not suitable for use in industrial applications and must first be optimized to improve properties such as catalytic efficiency, selectivity, and stability. Directed evolution is a powerful and versatile technology for adapting enzymes to make them suitable for use in commercial processes, but it is a costly and time-consuming process that requires specialist instrumentation only available in a handful of labs. Moreover, many chemical processes use non-natural reactions for which there are no known enzymes that can serve as starting templates for optimization. In this application, we will establish The International Centre for Enzyme Design (ICED), bringing together world leaders in computational protein design, enzyme engineering and industrial biocatalysis, to change the way that industrial biocatalysts are developed in the future. ICED will establish a fully integrated computational and experimental program, integrating the latest deep learning protein design tools with advanced experimental methods for enzyme engineering, to allow the reliable and predictable design of new and improved enzymes with a wide range of useful activities. In this way, ICED will deliver a step-change needed in the field to allow the rapid design of customized biocatalysts in response to diverse societal needs.
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