Dowpharma develops new enzyme technology

04 October 2007 16:48  [Source: ICIS news]

MILAN (ICIS news)--Dowpharma has developed a new technology to lower the cost of drug development for pharmaceutical companies, the company said on Thursday at the CPhI Worldwide conference.

 

“What we’re trying to do is lower the cost of the enzyme and hence make our offering more competitive for our small molecules business,” said leader of biocatalysis development at Dowpharma Karen Holt-Tiffin.

 

“The innovation was having the expression system that allows us to have much higher yields of the enzyme compared to what we used to have,” she added.

 

Holt-Tiffin said Dowpharma’s new Pfenex technology had a number of advantages over the E. Coli expression systems the company would have used in the past.

 

Pfenex does not need complex amino acids for starting material, while E. Coli needs amino acids such as milk or pancreatine, which are from animal sources.

 

“The pharmaceutical industry now is really cracking down. There is more of an insistence on having no animal products anywhere near the intermediates being used in pharmaceutical products,” said Holt-Tiffin.

 

In addition, the technology doesn’t need to have antibiotics in the medium, whereas the E. Coli system does, she added.

 

“Again, pharmaceutical companies don’t want the products sold to them to have been anywhere near any antibiotics,” Holt-Tiffin said.

 

Dowpharma is a business unit of Dow Chemical.

By: Feliza Mirasol
+1 713 525 2653

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