Biotech at the Table: Enzyme Technology in Modern Nutrition
29 Jul 2025 | Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute
This webinar will examine the macro forces reshaping the biotechnology landscape, from climate-driven sustainability goals to the need for robust, adaptive supply chains and health-conscious innovation. It will offer a clear-eyed and expert view of the opportunities and complexities ahead, grounded in scientific insight and real-world application. Through real life case studies and expert commentary, we’ll explore how AI and biodiversity screening are unlocking novel enzyme functionalities, and how these discoveries are being scaled—from microbial strain selection to commercial production via fermentation and biotransformation.
Hi all and welcome.
I'm very glad to welcome you all to today's webinar, Biotech at the Table, Enzyme Technology in Modern Nutrition, hosted by the KARE Health and Nutrition Institute.
I'll introduce myself very briefly.
My name is Grainne Biddle and I'm a senior communications Manager here at CARI.
And I suppose for anyone joining today who may not be familiar with the Carey Health and Nutrition Institute, the KHNI was established in 2015.
So this year we are very excitedly celebrating our 10th year.
And the goal of the KHNI has always been to bring credible scientific expertise and thought leadership to the food and beverage industry.
So, I'll give you a brief overview of our session today.
All righty.
OK.
So I'll shortly introduce you to our expert panel who will bring you through a really fantastic story, of enzymes, starting with the importance and critical role enzymes play in the food and beverage industry, both today and for the future.
I look back to how enzymes have developed through time with some fantastic insight on how enzymes have influenced so many aspects of our lives for thousands of years.
And then I look to the future, how machine learning is revolutionizing the evolution of enzyme technology.
So, to start with our panel.
We have Niall Higgins, PhD, Global Product Director for our enzyme business, who comes to us from our Global Innovation and Technology Center in Naas.
With a background in Research Science at the University of Nottingham, Niall has been working in Kerry enzyme technologies across the full innovation chain from concept design to product delivery for almost 10 years.
We're then privileged to have Andreas Vogel, PhD, VP of Research and Development at the Kerry Biotechnology Center powered by SEEA in Leipzig.
Trained in chemistry at the University of Munster with a PhD in biochemistry and chemistry and postdoctoral experience across the development of enzyme optimization methods, Andreas brings more than 20 years of experience in the field, and he is the author of more than 40 scientific publications and patents and co-editor of the book, Industrial Enzyme Applications.
And finally, also coming from the Kerry Biotechnology Center in Leipzig, Germany, we have Sebastian Bart, head of Bioinformatics.
During his diploma and PhD at the University of Greifswald, Sebastian investigated enzymatic catalysis mechanisms and optimized enzymes for industrial use.
Following his doctorate, Sebastian joined the University of Gronica as a postdoctoral researcher, where he expanded his expertise in using computational tools to explore the sequence structure function relationship of enzymes.
I'm just proud I got all those words out.
He is the inventor of several patents and author of 24 publications.
So I think from those few brief lines to introduce each of our panel, really highlights the vast wealth of knowledge and experience we're really lucky to have here today.
And, and so with that, I will hand over to the panel.
There will be a Q&A at the end of the session, and this session will be available on demand on our KHN H website.
Hello everyone, and thanks Grainne.
Thank you everyone for joining us today on today's webinar where we will discuss enzyme technology advances in modern nutrition.
So first to set the scene.
Biotechnology is radically transforming food, food processing and food production, and innovative biotech solutions such as pro and postbiotics, fermented peptides, enzymes will continue to play a critical role in shaping the future of the food and beverage industry.
And with that in mind, if you think about it, that the future of food production then relies on the continuous and significant advances in disciplines such as bioprocessing, enzyme technology, and even now artificial intelligence in order to sustain a growing population that's set to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050, while also reducing the negative impacts of food production on our planet.
Now you could ask, what are the key drivers at a macro level, pushing and driving the direction of this biotechnology innovation journey and modern nutrition.
Today it's, it's really our belief that this primarily centers around the need and the delivery of sustainable nutrition, which is effectively nutrition that's produced and delivered in a way that is mindful for both people, for planet, and obviously society.
Current global food systems simply cannot provide a sustainable, healthy diet for the world's increasing population.
So this in itself is driving and is fueling the need for novel biotechnological solutions to provide answers, to deliver sustainable solutions with the power to transform or reshape how and what we were, what we are doing in terms of food production today.
So how are we managing and mitigating our waste?
How are we creating affordable, sustainable nutrition?
But it's also important that the impacts of biotechnology are not just limited to production.
Biotechnology can also facilitate consumer health, can facilitate delivering on clean label, and of course taste, among many other possibilities.
Now the real challenge is always going to be that that any new to world biotech solution must also be perfectly aligned with customers' needs, bringing differentiated, healthy and sustainable products to consumers that ultimately provide great taste and sensory experiences.
And what's really exciting and in effect what's what's driving this webinar today is that recent advances in biotechnological processes such as precision fermentation, enzyme and strain engineering are now proving pivotal in this journey towards sustainable attrition by directly influencing many of the global challenges that we face today.
In today's session, we really want to put a spotlight on enzymes.
As on the sustainability journey, enzymes have become an increasingly important ally due to their high efficiency, their specificity, and their ability to create a more efficient food system.
In the broader context of biotechnological solutions for food and beverage, one thing that's clear is that for sure enzymes will continue to play a leading role by providing better nutrition.
Better and more efficient, cost effective processes and also having less of an impact on our Earth's resources in the process.
Now, enzymes, enzymes have been used in food production for centuries and produced commercially since approximately the I guess the mid-twentieth century.
And as nature's biocatalysts, enzymes are a really multifaceted technology.
So their benefits are multifaceted.
They're enabling operational efficiencies today, improving product quality, extending product shelf life, valorizing waste streams, unlocking nutrients, and that's just the, the, the scratching the surface.
If you look into some of the end use markets today where enzymes are currently used in bakery, for instance, enzymes are really revolutionizing how we make bread.
They're, they're widely used to deliver bread that's fresher for longer, used to improve flour quality, to strengthen dough and gluten networks and to even condition dough as as many other benefits.
Moving to alcoholic beverages, enzymes are widely used to ensure more efficient processing while reducing costs, you know, facilitating the use of, of different raw materials and ensuring consistent performance, particularly in terms of alcohol yield and production, and then into the nutrition space.
Across both animal and both human nutrition.
Starting with animal you'd say, you know, industry, the animal nutrition industry enzymes are really, they're synonymous with the modern animal production practices as an essential biotechnological tool that's ensuring animal performance and health consistently.
And then into the human space where we're now we're seeing a continued demand and growing focus on the impacts of enzymes as a dietary supplement.
The list across the food and beverage industry of where the enzymes play and add value is really endless.
And now enzymes are a biotech bio biological tool as they've been effectively harnessed from nature and that are produced in many living organisms such as bacteria and fungi are produced at large commercial scale by these enzymes where they're naturally produced.
And The key exciting thing in today's discussion that we really wanted to shed light on is that how recent advances in modern day biotechnological capabilities are now delivering or enabling the delivery of new to world enzyme solutions where we can take what nature has provided and engineer it to be best fitted to customer needs.
A space that we feel is, is really now very exciting.
It's evolving very rapidly and opening doors to a whole range of new possibilities.
So by making use of bioinformatics, machine learning and artificial intelligence right now, best in class enzymes are being created for commercial markets.
Maybe to give you a closer, let's say flavor to this, let's look very quickly at a particular case study outlining the use and implementation of advanced biotechnology to create a neutral world enzyme solution, reducing acrylamide in instant coffee.
So, acrylamite, acrylamite is a chemical that's, that's known in the food and beverage industry as a possible carcinogenic compound and is formed during high temperature cooking processes again such as coffee roasting.
So, in the instant coffee industry, acrylamide levels are actually particularly high.
And until now, there's been no existing technical solution on the market to address this problem.
So, over the last recent years, within the last year, year and a half years, actually, a new world solution was created, which is capable of completely removing the crylamide that's formed in instant coffee.
And this works as effectively as a simple drop-in solution in the process.
So, let's take a little, maybe a closer look into the technology as.
So this innovation, the development of this new tech new to world technology first started by taking an enzyme from nature that was never used before in industry and engineering it to be more stable under the acidity and the high temperatures of the instant coffee manufacturing process, effectively enabling this enzyme then to become a viable, cost effective drop in solution to reduce acrylamide and instant coffee.
Now this model on your screen is is showing what the enzyme looks like, gives you an idea of its shape and the enzymes 3D structure.
But the thing I'd really like you to take notice of is the colored segments of this model.
These are highlighting where we engineered mutations or alterations to the 3D structure of the enzyme enabling it to work again under the acidity and the high temperature of the instant coffee manufacturing process.
So hopefully this gives you a flavor of, let's say the advanced biotechnological capabilities to engineer an enzyme from nature to make it best fitted to commercial industrial processes for this specific one to reduce acrylamide again.
Giving, let's say, healthier, more, let's say, yeah, consumer conscious product to the market lower in rimide.
So I'll leave you with this, that enzymes have been evolving to catalyze new chemical reactions for billions of years and will continue to do so for many more.
But in the native form, they're far from perfect catalysts when you look at, let's say the requirements and demands of modern day food and beverage applications.
And now with the power of modern biotechnological capabilities, we have the ability to take what nature has provided to us and engineer it to be a best in class industry aid set to reshape the food and beverage industry.
But the question then is, and in examples like I've just given, what does that process look like?
How, how is that process of creating these neutral world enzymes evolved?
And what does, what does this, this hold for the future in terms of the technological capabilities in our hands today?
So with that, I would hand over to the real technical experts on this topic, that be my colleagues on the call as here, Ambassador Andreas and Sebastian, who are going to walk us through the evolution of enzymes and the power we now hold in our hands going forward to create new to world solutions.
So with that, over to you, Andreas, and take it from there.
Thank you very much, Nia.
I'm happy to take it over.
So, hello.
So I'm now recording from the Leipzig labs, and I wanna take you through a journey through time.
Our enzymes were discovered and developed for disruptive application in the past and today.
And biotechnology or enzyme transformations of food have been playing a key role in human nutrition.
Since a long, long time.
In, in the form of food fermentation, that played a key role to, preserve food, to enhance flavor.
And to increase the nutritional value.
The example of wine.
Is a very Easy example of a spontaneous fermentation.
So if you have ripe fruits and let them sit.
The fruit juice, the, the sweet fruit juice will transform, into wine.
Which is a, yeah, very pleasant alcoholic beverage, but if you let it sit longer, it, the fermentation will go on and another step is coming in and it will turn into vinegar.
Wine and vinegar are two very important fermentative products still today.
And what I will point out here that even 6000 BC.
Humans learned how to control that very complex microbial process, and they were able to stop at the stage of the wine and don't let it go into the vinegar, which is not so pleasant to drink.
Cheesemaking is another, another very important example.
When, farming of milk animals started, that there was the need to preserve the milk, and one way to preserve the milk is cheese making.
And The first step in cheese making is done by adding enzymes as we know today, or lactic acid bacteria.
So this was a very important step in the evolution of mankind.
Yeah, and when we come to cereals, why do you think people start to settle and plant and farm cereals?
For sure, it was for beer brewing.
Beer and bread brewing, there is some discussion what comes first, but there are some arguments that beer brewing came first and they sound quite convincing, I would say.
But anyway, yeah, and bread are related in a way, and we know today that they are related in the type of microbial transformation that is applied here, which is the yeast.
The, what is today known as a baker's yeast.
The Latin name is Zahorousus servisia, so the, the fungus of the beer.
So it originated from beer brewing, but it's now used more or less exclusively by the bakers.
So the beer brewers use different teas today.
But that points out how important the microbiology was already 4000 BC or even longer.
Since in beer brewing, the sacrification of the starch in the grain is done in the Western countries by the malting process.
And in Asia, they use a different method, and the the psychology process.
The coi is a Fungus, aspergillus aurita, which is a kind of domesticified fungus, it, it originates also from a toxic mold, and, the aspergillus aurita lost its toxicity and could be applied to, yeah.
Clarify the starch from rice mainly and create wonderful flavorful products like soy sauce, like miso paste.
And like alcoholic beverages, it's darker.
So what I want to show you here that in a way, microbial and enzyme-driven process have been long time part of our diet, long before we even knew what enzymes or microbes are.
And when did we know what enzymes and microbes are?
And that was in the end of the 19th century.
So Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur established microbiology as a scientific discipline.
And they gave an explanation how the alcoholic fermentation, is going on.
So, by the action of the microbes.
And in 1978, the German physiologist Wilhelm Kohler Point to er enzyme.
And the name enzyme refers to its presence in sourdough or yeast.
And what Kulle meant with the term enzyme was that this is an active biological component that is active without having a living organism.
So that's the original definition of an enzyme and it still holds true today.
Action without living.
And at the same time, so even some years before the name enzyme was coined, the first enzyme plant was built in Denmark by Christian Hansen.
Which is still a big player in global industrial enzyme industry.
Now part of Novonesis after merging with Novozymes, but they established the third enzyme plants with using rennet coon calf stomach, and rennet was used for cheese making mainly.
Another very important landmark, I want to point out was in 1894.
So the Japanese entrepreneur Takamine.
Fight What we know today as the first pattern of a microbial enzyme.
And he is of Japanese origin, Takamine, and he moved to the US.
And he was using the Koji process that I just showed on the slide before.
So the traditional Koji process, which is so important in Japan, and he discovered the opportunities from the enzyme products that the Koji fungus is forming.
So it's mainly amylases and proteases.
We call that diastase and uses in a broad brewing process.
So I'd like to call this area the wild type area.
The enzymes that were used were the enzymes that are just present, the, the enzymes that they could get.
So you take what you get and you search an application for it.
The picture changed starting with the 70s when recombinant DNA technology was invented and awarded with the Nobel Prize later on.
So with recombinant DNA technology, we were able to Take fragments of DNA from different host organisms, join them together, and prepare, yeah, , a, a new DNA that could be used by microorganisms to produce what we call recombinant enzymes.
So in this example, you take the DNA from the calf.
Isolate the, the fragment that encodes for the thymousine, so the enzyme in the rennet that is causing the, , starting the cheese-making process.
You combine it with a microbial DNA what is pointed out here as a vector, recombine it to a new DNA.
And when you bring that into the microorganism bag, the microorganism will produce the enzyme.
So this technology allowed now for consistent production of enzymes in high quality, high teeter, and with a good scalability.
It even went further, beginning in the 90s with the so-called directed enzyme evolution technology.
Francis Arnold received the Nobel Prize just a few years ago.
And with that invention, we were able to adapt the enzymes to the needs in the industry.
So, and giving rise to new applications like synthesis of active pharma ingredients or on or The ingredients like Like human milk oligosaccharides.
So I like to call this recombinant era, you create what you want, and it was a clear mind shift to the take what you get.
Suddenly, you were able to adapt the enzymes to the process that you need and that boost new applications.
But the technology evolution didn't stop at the time.
So after the 90s, the Enzyme engineering technologies were developed very dynamically and very rapidly.
So the first methods like the random mtogenesis, also DNA shuffling, which were often used together or in combination, they all rely on chance.
And what you need to do is you created a Large library size, that means , you create 1,000s, 10,000, 100s, 000s, even millions of variants of the same enzyme.
And Only a few of them are good, and, and the, the challenge is to find out which are good.
I will come to that later.
But that limits this technology to expert with expert equipment.
Around the 2000s.
It started to combine rational thoughts with the random ideas of directed evolution.
So the so-called semi-rational enzyme engineering.
Was very widespread among the labs at that time.
And that was because the library sizes could get much more smaller than and that gave access to a much more broader audience of scientists to apply this technology.
And this story goes on.
More data were generated in 2010 data-driven enzyme engineering because more data are available, especially by the next generation sequencing method, NGS.
And bioinformatics became more and more important to apply in this process, because, yeah, there were so many data available and scientists always think about how to use the data in a reasonable way.
In 2018, there, there was the first enzymes of what's designed on the computer, and that was quite a breakthrough, I would say.
Although the enzyme is not applicable for industrial application, it's still too weak in activity, and we are not there where we can use those enzymes, but it may be a starting point.
Yeah.
2022 AI is suddenly everywhere and it also found its way into enzyme engineering, still in a quite explorative way, I would say.
But my colleague, Sebastian, will talk about this later in more detail.
Yeah, what I want to show here in 2024, so just last year, the Nobel Prize was given again in the field of enzyme engineering.
And that was for David Baker for the Novo design and for scientists from Google's DeepMind for the alpha for where they demonstrated that protein structures, so not enzyme structures, protein structures can be predicted in a very accurate way.
So, the story always goes on and I'm excited to see what's going to happen in 10 years.
So, Maybe we will be able to design a , enzyme on the computer that can be directly used for, for Or industrial application, but we're still not there.
OK.
The directed evolution, how is this working today?
I want to guide you through the steps of how we do it and how many others apply these technologies.
So the basic Technology, is the basic algorithm, I would say, is mimicking the natural evolution ution after principles of Darwin, mutation and selection.
So we create a gene library by mutation.
So this library can be very large, and, and this is one of the challenges I will come to in a minute.
The gene library is translated into enzymes.
And these enzymes, now, there are a few good ones, a lot of, so nothing happened, and a lot of bad enzymes that do not work anymore.
The challenge is here to find out which are the good ones, the few good ones.
But that's basically the process, mutation and selection.
And as I said, in the gene libraries can be very large and they have to be very large.
So the good ones appear on a frequency of let's say 1 in 1000, maybe 1 in 100, maybe only 1 in 10,000.
So, You, in, in the early days, there was a desire to create very large libraries and to screen very large libraries, but how large can these libraries are?
And I'll give you an example.
Given an amino acid, so this is a chain of amino acids of let's say 300 amino acids in the chain that would be a typical number.
And if you want to apply just 3 mutations, 3 mutations at a time.
And if you calculate how many combinations are possible.
You end up with a number.
Which would mean if you look at each enzyme just for one second, if you have a screening system that can analyze the enzyme function in 1 2nd, one after each other, we would need to start in the year 900.
And then past Columbus discovers America, past the French Revolution, and today, yeah, we would be done with screening of the one library.
And it even goes further, when you increase the number to 6 mutation, the, the number of Orions that you create already exceeds the number of sand grains on Earth.
So that makes clear it's not going that way.
That it is not possible.
But how do we do that then?
The aquilarase that Nia showed just, so the, the example that we created and that it's now in commercial production, it contains 11 mutations.
So how can we come to 11 mutations?
And the answer is, the answer is we need smart strategies.
It's about having a streamlined workflow experimentally.
It's about having bioinformatics to support the process.
And utmost important, we need to have good analytics, and good analytics need meaningful screening analytics.
So in, in the screening process, we always have to balance between quality and speed, but we need a meaningful analytics, otherwise, the enzyme evolution just goes the wrong way and we don't get what we want.
So what we do here in Leitz is we , start with the screening analytics, and that defines.
What throughput we can apply?
Can we screen 10,000 zambarians in a reasonable time, let's say a week?
But can we screen only 1000 or maybe even only 100?
And if the number is only 100, Then, we have to think about our library design much more, find clever ways to design the libraries.
And this is where bioinformatics play a more and more important role.
On the final technical slide, I want to add another very charming element of the directive evolution algorithm.
And that is after one of these circles that you see on the right side.
It doesn't stop.
You can repeat the circle several times and add and add more mutations and , looking at the left-hand picture, you go stepwise up the mountain even higher and improve the The performance of the enzyme step by step until you reach the summit.
So there is a summit, there is a natural border about what enzymes can do.
But with this charming element that the iterative cycle, you can climb up very much.
So, in the end, what I want to demonstrate here with the technologies that we have is that enzyme engineering, so the direct evolution algorithm is about intelligent design and it's not about applying brute force.
I don't want to close without having an example, demonstrating an example how this translates into product generation.
So this is an example where engineer, engineered enzymes enable the synthesis of an ingredient.
And what you see here is, at the start of the process with the enzymes, you get from the Y type enzymes you get.
The process is often very inefficient.
You need high enzyme loads, which mean high costs.
The product titers are low.
In this case, you see, so the desired product is a green one.
You see the desired product is forming, which is always good.
So it, it is already happening what you want to happen.
But a lot of side products are formed.
And most important in, in the field of food ingredient is that it has an impact on the taste.
So it didn't taste good.
There were a lot of off-taste flavor aftertaste, bitterness.
And with enzyme engineering, We ended up with this.
So the conversion curve looks much better now.
We get a high product yield of more than 90%, a high product title.
And very low side product formation, and that translated directly into taste.
So we obtained in the end, the desired taste profile.
So what we created here in the end is a product, product that cannot only produce very efficiently, but that also tastes delicious.
Yeah, with that example, I want to close my part.
I hope I could show you that enzyme engineering make things work.
It makes things work better, smarter, and more sustainable.
And now I hand over to my colleague Sebastian, who is going into the next generation of enzymes.
Sebastian, thank you, Andreas.
So I will take you on a journey into the future.
As Andrea has already showed you, the classical directed evolution is an exclusively greedy process.
This plot shows you the variants that we can reach using the classic directed evolution.
And Andreas explained the problem that we have, so many possible variants which we could try and at the end in the lab, we can only test a few 1000 of them.
So, if we want to know what is left and right of, of this hill, we need the help of directed evolution, of, of machine learning.
I'm sorry.
So, if we want to zoom out and get a better view on this landscape which surrounds the hill which we just climbed, we might see that there are even larger mountains which are interesting to explore.
There are different pathways which lead to, to higher mountain tops eventually.
And we can only reach those if we can expand the sequence diversity, we are looking at.
And with the help of machine learning and next-generation sequencing and other tools, we now have the possibility to do that.
So how does it work?
We sample different positions on this map.
Train the computer to learn how the terrain looks like and then ask the computer, where do I find the highest mountain tops.
Of course, the first predictions are probably not perfect.
So also here we go through iterative cycles like Andreas Strauss show.
And, so we call this approach machine learning assisted directed evolution.
And so in the first, after a few iterations, the, the computer probably learned how this terrain looks like and it gets more and more precise predictions where the highest mountain tops are.
And with this technology, we can develop even better enzymes faster and Limit the amount of screening we need in the lab.
Now I want to get one step further and talk about artificial intelligence.
So I'm quite sure that everybody in this session already use ChatGBT, co-pilot Geminis, Siri or Alexa, you name it.
So personally, I really like to use their support.
ChatGPT was released in 2022 and it was really a disruptive technology.
And at the same time, a similar development happened in the biotech world.
So as Andreas already showed, alpha-fold 2 was released also in the same year 2022, and it was also for the biotech and enzyme development, field of disruptive innovation.
The 3D structure of an enzyme depends on the amino acid sequence.
So the sequence Of an enzyme is just a chain of 20 different amino acids.
It's quite long and it in nature, it always folds into the into the same 3D fold.
For many decades, scientists tried to, to solve or, yeah, solve this riddle how enzymes fold into a 3D structure and in 2022, suddenly, we had a tool which could predict that with a high precision and accuracy.
With a 3D structure, we can calculate and simulate many properties of proteins and enzymes.
For example, we can use tools for molecular docking to analyze where the active site of an enzyme is and how and where substrates bind.
We can estimate which substrates fit into the enzyme and which might not, and we can also then rationally design or mutate this enzyme to accommodate maybe larger or smaller substrates and make reactions possible which were not naturally catalyzed by this enzyme.
And we can now even also design our own proteins so we can tell the computer what kind of shape or protein we would like to have and within a few seconds, the computer will tell us which , see amino acid sequence we should use to reach that.
And that's really a game-changer for enzyme design.
So you, you might now ask why does AI not Why does AI not simply design the best possible enzyme for any given application?
The problem is that enzymes are not static structures like a house where you can easily calculate how strong you need to build the walls to tolerate rain or wind and snow.
They wobble and they are highly dynamic.
You can see that on the right side.
And it's, it's really important to distinguish at this point enzymes from proteins.
And this is a message which I hope you can take home from here.
So, every enzyme is a protein, but not every protein has an enzymatic function, and it's really important.
So you could compare the function.
With an engine of a car, so for a chemical reaction to happen, a fine-tuned orchestrated machinery is needed in your biology classes.
You probably heard about the analogy of the key and the lock.
Only if the key, which is a substrate, perfectly fits the lock, you can open it.
And 30 years ago, scientists thought that enzyme catalysis catalysis exactly works like this.
So you just need to find a perfectly match between the lock and the key, and then you get a product produced from an enzyme.
But unfortunately, we found out that this is not so simple.
For a chemical reaction to happen, you need a lot more than that.
And, for example, if you get into your AI design car and turn the key in the lock, when you do not have an engine in your car building, you probably go nowhere from here.
And AI currently learned how a car or a protein looks like so it can predict its shape, but it does not have an understanding about the engine and how an enzyme works, and this is a very complicated process and it's also very complicated to train a computer to learn how an enzyme exactly works.
Even more complicated it is, because the enzymatic activity depends on many different factors like pH, temperature, the concentration of substrates and products.
So the challenge now for the future is to develop ways for predicting active enzymes.
And at the moment, we are not really there.
The state of the art approach at the currently is to, to design a protein using AI as I just explained.
And then you need very , complicated calculations, using molecular dynamics and quantum quantum mechanical calculations to, to find out and induce this machinery which leads to an active enzyme.
Many people in the world at the moment are working on that, and I'm very sure that in the future, we will get to a point where the design of functioning enzymes solely on the computer will be possible.
At the moment, we are not yet there, not yet there.
Yeah, for me as a scientist in this field, it's truly an amazing time.
And I'm really curious what will come next.
So, We are slowly getting to the end of the session and before I hand back over to Nai, I would broadly want to look at the long evolution of enzyme technology which Andrea started earlier.
Thousands of thousands of years ago with the alcoholic fermentation, we started our journey and, Then for quite some time, the development or the pace was quite slow and early in the 19th century, several breakthrough discoveries led to a massive increased pace.
The microbiology led to molecular biology.
This led us to, to the understanding of DNA and how DNA works and then later with a recombinant enzyme.
And then later led to the recommended enzyme production.
At that point, we could produce enzymes at scale and even very sustain sustainable.
We had a, we heard a few, about a few examples here.
With the rise of the directed evolution, new to the world products were developed like the quires that Nile introduced at the beginning.
And now, we already entered the area of artificial intelligence and based on my experience in the enzymes industry, I'm convinced that this is a truly disruptive technology that acce accelerates the development of novel enzymes and products with unprecedented speed and precision.
From a new to the world biotechnology perspective, the exciting part is that this enables us more to listen to the needs of the customers and food producers.
We now can better address the challenges and then subsequently develop higher specific solutions that are fit enough to survive harsh conditions of industrial processing and maybe even enable us to address the challenges of the future already now.
People often emphasize that.
Out of the box, out of the box thinking, it is very important.
And this is actually a challenge for all of us to, to imagine products which at the moment seem to be unimaginable today.
And , maybe it just takes a few years for them to become reality.
So with that, I now want to hand you over back to Nay and some who summarize and close the session.
Many thanks and over to you, Naya.
Thanks, Sebastian.
Thanks, Andreas.
And, and look, so before closing, firstly, I, I would just like to say thank you all for joining us on this webinar, for spending the last 30 minutes or so exploring with us recent advances in biotechnological capabilities regarding enzymes and, and strain engineering and, , you know, what we would really hope is that after this webinar that, that we have, let's say 3 primary key take-homes.
And the first would be that You know, hopefully we've helped to emphasize the importance of, of continuous advances in biotechnology, which again are going to play a critical role in shaping the, the future of the food and beverage industry that is under real pressure now to create a a a world of sustainable attrition.
Secondly, we would, you know, we also hope that we've deepened your understanding of the role enzymes play in today's food and beverage industry as as walked you through going back quite a way until today's world, but walked you through the history and continuous evolution of enzymes to get to where we are today.
But, but lastly and, and most importantly, we hope that we've left you with the, the same excitement that we feel about the future.
So that the doors of possibility are and truly open now.
And it's incredibly exciting to envisage the impact that new to world enzyme solutions will have in, in shaping the future of the food and beverage industry.
And that's really through leveraging the recent and and rapid biotechnological advances that we're now seeing in this industry or in this field and that ultimately that the power that we now hold, now hold within our hands.
So with that, again, I would like to say thanks for joining us on the webinar and Grainne, I, I'll hand over to you to close out the session.
Thank you.
OK, thanks, Nia.
And really first and foremost, thanks to our panel, and thank you all for taking the time today to share with us, your expertise and thank you for taking the time for such a fantastic presentation.
We've had some really great questions come through.
I'll touch on the first one here now, as you've just mentioned new to world enzymes.
How long does it take to develop a neutral world enzyme?
It's it's to you all, so.
No, I, I, I can take it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's look, it's, it's, it's a really good question.
And, and when we, we get asked quite a lot and look, not to, not to duck and dive it completely, but I would say it's, it's really on a case by case basis really to answer that question.
When you're looking to develop a new enzyme, a lot of, a lot of the time it depends on how close the native enzyme is to what you need an application, i.e.
The requirements that are on.
The, that you need to put on the enzyme in its native form to get it to be as fit as possible as it needs to be to be brought into the industrial application world or into the food and beverage world.
And how many rounds of the mutation process that both Sebastian and Andreas touched on the previous part of the webinar are required to get it there.
But you know, however, I would say that the cool thing is that, you know, years ago, something that might have taken up to 12 years, even more, you know, can be done a hell of a lot faster now in terms of 1 to 2 months.
And this is true predominantly a lot of the techniques that Sebastian's referred to.
You also have to factor in, you know, when taking an idea, to actually a product on the market, you have to factor in the application development work that's required as also.
And this is again, working to actually trial and develop the best candidate that's fit for purpose and application and make sure that it's validated an application in-house and also together with our customers.
So that's a, that's a whole science unto itself that's required in terms of application development or new new product development.
You also have to make sure that the enzyme you've developed is, is scalable.
It's production is scalable and scalable in a cost effective manner so that it's, it's a cost effective solution for, for consumers, and for our customers.
And, and then of course, you know, there's elements like the ever evolving regulatory landscape globally, which is, is really going to, let's say, play a key role in, in impacting and dictating your time in terms of go to market.
So it is really, it's really case by case and and dependent on the induce market, dependent on the innovation type that you're looking at can be anywhere from 12 or 5 years.
It's kind of a how long is a piece of string type of answer.
I know, but, but yeah, it it it's case by case.
But it's, it's a lot more rapid today for creating new world solutions than what it was many, many moons ago.
Great.
Thank you.
And this one is, is to both Andreas and Sebastian, but obviously, you've both worked in the industry for so long.
So what future developments or future potential are you most excited by personally in this industry?
OK, maybe if I start, Sebastian, yeah.
The future potential.
I, I, I, so according to, to the talk I had, I like to look back a bit and more to the future maybe.
So, when, when I look back, so I, I came into early 2000 into enzyme engineering.
I was fascinated about what was happening there.
And at that time, the enzyme evolution technology was really a type for specialists.
You needed high throughput equipment.
So, only a few labs who could afford to do that and a few specialists who were able to do that.
And the fascinating thing to me was to see how this progresses, how this became available to more or less each lab.
Everybody can do a little bit of engineering.
I would say creating an industrial applicable enzyme is another thing, but I, I haven't seen that at the time that this is possible where we are today.
So, currently, I would say the enzyme engineering technology went from a, a specialist field to a very major field of technology where you can rely on.
We can, we know quite when we get a project on the table, how long it would take, what we can achieve, and where are the limits.
And that is already a, a great, great thing.
And fascinating.
It fascinates me still as Sebastian to see what comes next.
And yeah, maybe they will.
Let some words to Sebastian, you know, how you see the future.
Yeah, I, I showed you the slide with the evolution of enzyme technology and the pace is kind of exponentially growing at the moment.
So every day when I enter the office, I find news about new tools which are even easier to use and and can do so much more than, than other than than than the previous tools.
So, the, the technology development is, is at the moment it's a rapid pace, especially in the bioinformatics space when you consider this AI and bioinformatics.
Technology development.
And there are other technologies like this, I shortly just mentioned that next generation sequencing.
So now we have access to so much sequence data, I, I just recently read it's, it's already much more than text on the internet.
So we have an incredibly amount of, of data available just waiting there to be analyzed and new tools now enable us to, to use that as a resource and, and convert that into new products into enzymes which are new to the world which show functionalities which were not possible like yesterday and That's, that's extremely exciting, from, from my point of view.
OK, great.
Thank you both.
And one to you, Nia.
What do you think is the future in this space in terms of products that will reach consumers?
Yeah, thanks, Corne.
For this one, I, I, I, I would say, look, obviously this is one that nobody has a, has a clear answer for.
But in, in general, maybe if I was to put it into three different buckets, I would say that I think that firstly you'll see a continued improvement upon the, let's say capabilities or functionalities of enzymes that are known and established already in the different induce markets today that we touched on.
So like, Bakery or alcoholic beverage.
And this is that, you know, while you'll see the advancement in the disciplines that are fueling how we create enzymes and biotechnologies, you'll also see developing further this feeding insight to develop further improvements and specificities of the enzymes that are already established in these different end use markets.
So more best in class enzymes that are already known in these areas.
I think that's one first element you'll see.
I, I, I think you'll also see a lot of, let's say, , existing production processes or, you know, moving from, let's say more high chemical, high energy processes to more cost effective greener solutions that are also going to incorporate best in class enzymes.
And then on the, on the really exciting parts on the, the neutral world solution part.
Who, who knows?
I, I, I guess we can't say exactly on, on this call right now.
But , I know, let's say for ourselves on, on Kerry's side, we're, we're, we're working on many new, new to world enzyme solution biotechnology developments at the moment.
And I'm sure many others are as also.
But what I think that is for sure is with the advances that we've seen in enzyme technology developments.
We should and we'll see a lot more new enzymes, new previously undescribed or previously, firstly, let's say described enzymes into different end use market applications into food and beverage.
So this being the more new to world solution part, we, we will now through these capabilities have the, let's say we'll start to see more and more new to world solutions or, or let's say first described enzymes in from an application perspective coming through more and more.
I hope that's answered the question, Grainne.
Yeah, absolutely.
OK, thanks, Nia.
And I think that's kind of all we have time for.
And for other questions and that come through, we can certainly reach out with that additional information.
And just to echo Nia, thank you all for joining us.
This session, as I said, will be available on demand on our KHNI website, and along with all of the other content that is published.
So please do Go there and check it out, and, and thank you again and please join us for the next webinar.
We're hoping in or around October, so stay tuned.
Vice President of Research and Development
Senior Content and Communications Manager
Global Product Director
Andreas Vogel PhD
Vice President of Research and Development
Grainne Biddle
Senior Content and Communications Manager
Niall Higgins PhD
Global Product Director
Sebastian Bartsch PhD
Head of Bioinformatics
Sebastian Bartsch PhD
Head of Bioinformatics
Andreas Vogel PhD
Vice President of Research and Development
Grainne Biddle
Senior Content and Communications Manager
Niall Higgins PhD
Global Product Director
Sebastian Bartsch PhD
Head of Bioinformatics
