Chemistry Through Biology: Translating Molecular Biology Technologies into Practical Processes for API Production

The natural world demonstrates an exquisite capability to perform complex, efficient and elegant chemistry. Humans have been increasingly successful in innovating ways to engineer these natural tools and algorithms to our own goals.

Through rapidly evolving technologies and strategies for modern molecular biology (e.g., gene sequencing, writing, and editing; synthetic biology; directed evolution; etc.) impressive advances have been accomplished. As we look ahead, further efforts can and are being made to adapt these complex emerging technologies into new and useful applications with commercially-viable processes. Many well-established classical chemistry and engineering principles and approaches can be integrated for efficient translation of these innovative molecular biology tools into more practical, scalable and effective chemical processes.

In this free webinar, the featured speaker will explore the key advances and critical hurdles for translating these emerging molecular biology technologies into real-world applications and commercial processes.

 Topics for discussion will include:

• A brief history of biocatalysis with a look at its current and future growth trends
• Role of practical process development for synthetic biology, fermentation and biocatalysis
• Case studies demonstrating industrial applications of synthetic biology and biocatalysis
• cGMP and regulatory issues to consider for fermentation and biocatalysis
• The value of a multi-disciplinary team in development

Speaker

Peter C. Michels, PhD, Head of Global Fermentation, AMRI

Dr. Peter Michels has a 25-year industrial record, focusing on applications of synthetic biocatalysis and pharmacology to pharmaceutical discovery and development. He received his Bachelor of Science degree (Summa Cum Laude) in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he received the Ricketts prize. He completed his PhD in Biochemical Engineering with Douglas Clark at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received numerous honors, including multiple fellowships from the National Science Foundation and from Tau Beta Pi. Dr. Michels continued to work with Dr. Clark and Jon Dordick of RPI to build EnzyMed Inc., a company that innovated new applications of biocatalysis to pharmaceutical active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) process development. EnzyMed was subsequently acquired in 1999 by AMRI, where Pete led the fermentation, synthetic biocatalysis, ADMET/DMPK, metabolite synthesis and preclinical development efforts for numerous drug candidates. Dr. Michels has contributed to more than 23 patents and applications, and over 60 publications.

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