Introducing enzymatic technology: The process reinventing materials production

Global demand for chemicals and materials is projected to quadruple by 2050, straining energy- and resource-intensive production systems. Meeting this demand will require more than incremental efficiencies: it calls for a fundamental reinvention of how we produce essential materials to ensure resilience, scalability and long-term abundance.

Enter enzymatic technology, a biomanufacturing approach that leverages enzymes—nature’s molecular architects—to reimagine how we produce everything from chemicals to textiles. Produced by living cells, enzymes are biological catalysts that accelerate chemical reactions without being changed by the reaction itself

While enzymes have long been used in food processing and pharmaceuticals, recent breakthrough applications are transforming them into the backbone of next-generation manufacturing.

Here are five ways enzyme-based manufacturing presents an opportunity to reimagine industrial production, ultimately decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation.

The economic appeal of enzymatic processes becomes clear when looking at energy efficiency. Chemical catalysis has long been viewed as the primary pathway to sustainable, efficient production; however, specialized enzymes can significantly reduce energy requirements and also enable operation under mild conditions. Both material and energy consumption have been shown to decrease with enzyme technology, and industries adopting enzymatic approaches report dramatic reductions in both operational costs and environmental impact.

This revolution in enzymatic manufacturing has been widely demonstrated in biofuel production, where both free lipase and immobilized lipase reduced process energy consumption due to milder reaction conditions.

Similarly, take carbon-to-material conversion platforms that leverage cell-free biocatalysis. Unlike fermentation processes that require energy-intensive conditions to sustain living organisms, these enzymatic approaches operate under mild conditions while delivering superior productivity.

So far, advanced carbon-to-material platforms like that offered by our company, Rubi Laboratories, have reported up to 10 times lower energy requirements compared to conventional methods for producing essential products like cellulose and primary chemicals.

Traditional manufacturing often generates substantial waste. For example, fermentation processes often produce over 70% byproduct waste due to cell toxicity limitations and cell biomass waste.

Enzymatic systems flip this equation, converting significantly higher percentage of inputs into the desired product with minimal waste generation. Advanced systems can achieve near 100% conversion yields, and often above 90% yields – dramatically higher than the approximate 30% yields typical of fermentation-based processes.

Enzyme systems have been shown to match or outperform yields of optimized chemical systems as well, like a breakthrough nine-enzyme process for specialty drug production that nearly doubled yields compared with the original chemical process. Higher yields enable better margins and make sustainable production economically competitive with resource-intensive alternatives.

The implications ripple through entire supply chains. Higher yields mean reduced raw material requirements (that are often linked to resource extraction or deforestation), fewer production cycles and less waste.

Historically, enzymes were primarily used to break down existing natural materials, from plant-derived sugars to waste processing. Today's enzymatic applications address previously intractable waste streams, such as plastics.

PETase enzymes are a key example, as they can uniquely enable rapid degradation polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, which is widely used in food and drink packaging. Whereas the biodegradation of PET by natural means takes hundreds to thousands of years, PETases can degrade it in a matter of days.

Recent developments show even more promise, where untreated, post-consumer PET from 51 different products was almost completely degraded by the new FAST-PETase enzyme in only one week, suggesting real-world applicability beyond laboratory conditions.

The application and scaling of these enzymes have presented challenges due to their relatively slow reaction rates and substrate accessibility issues, but global scientific efforts are working to overcome these limitations.

Perhaps the most revolutionary application lies in using enzymes to construct complex products from basic carbon building blocks. This represents a paradigm shift from extraction-based manufacturing to synthesis-based production from waste streams.

Advanced cell-free enzymatic cascades can transform carbon dioxide (CO2), an abundant waste product, into high-quality new materials through carefully designed sequences of enzymes that work like molecular assembly lines. These processes create pure products that match current industry standards, while operating without harsh process conditions or inefficient living cells.

This bottoms-up synthesis approach also offers unprecedented control over material properties. Unlike traditional manufacturing that must work within the constraints of existing natural materials, enzymatic synthesis allows for the design of chemicals and materials with superior characteristics for targeted applications.

Companies like Rubi Laboratories are pioneering this emerging CO2-to-materials frontier in enzymatic manufacturing. The economic implications are profound: by transforming waste carbon into valuable materials, this approach can enable abundance independent of extraction-based manufacturing through symbiotic manufacturing systems.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating enzyme development at an unprecedented pace, solving challenges that would take decades through traditional methods. AI can dramatically improve the accuracy of protein design, enabling the creation of enzymes with previously impossible capabilities.

Recent breakthroughs demonstrate AI's transformative potential in the enzyme space. Scientists have created an AI system capable of generating artificial enzymes from scratch. In laboratory tests, some of these enzymes performed as well as those found in nature, even when their artificially generated amino acid sequences diverged significantly from those of any known natural protein. The first functional artificial protein, fully designed by AI, showed activity comparable to that of natural enzymes, despite having only 69% identity to any known natural protein.

The machine learning-guided approach yielded a global optimum twice as often, with a 30% reduction in the number of variants tested compared to standard directed evolution approaches. This acceleration has the potential to unlock entirely new regions of enzyme possibility space that natural evolution never explored.

Recent advancements in AI offer new opportunities to accelerate improvements in enzyme performance by enabling deeper insights into sequence, structure and function. Transformer-based models, originally built for processing human language, are now being repurposed to interpret vast protein sequence datasets with remarkable success.

These tools are not only aiding in the identification of potentially advantageous mutations, but are also enabling the design of enzyme variants with multiple coordinated changes – opening the door to more dramatic new functions than those typically achieved through the step-by-step approach of conventional directed evolution. Companies leveraging in-house AI enzyme engineering report industry-leading results with minimal investment, creating compounding effects that traditional approaches cannot match.

The convergence of AI-driven enzyme design, novel applications in waste stream processing, and CO2-based synthesis approaches is creating an entirely new frontier of energy-efficient and sustainable manufacturing.

As these breakthroughs rise to the industrial scales demonstrated by now-ubiquitous early enzymatic technologies, we're witnessing the emergence of supply chains that bring us closer to abundance and prosperity for people and the planet.