The Evolving Landscape of Industrial Biocatalysis in Perspective from the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable

As the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable
(GCIPR) approached its 20th anniversary, the Biocatalysis Focus Team
surveyed its member companies to better understand how biocatalysis
is currently being leveraged across their pipelines. This article
presents an analysis of the dataset collected from pharmaceutical
and agrochemical companies, highlighting the evolving biocatalysis
landscape with expanding impact of enzyme catalysis driven by protein
engineering. The increasing complexity of active pharmaceutical ingredients
(APIs) demands efficient and sustainable synthesis routes, prompting
the pharmaceutical industry to adopt innovative methodologies. In
this context, biocatalysis has emerged as a particularly attractive
solution, as it enables streamlined syntheses under mild reaction
conditions with intrinsically safer reaction profiles compared with
conventional chemistry. Over the past two decades, numerous API manufacturing
processes have integrated biocatalysis, leveraging a wide range of
enzymes in early drug discovery and route scouting activities. Advances
in directed evolution, computational tools, and adjacent technologies
now allow for the rapid discovery and optimization, further expanding
the use of biocatalysis in pharmaceutical manufacturing.