Biocatalyst immobilization in millistructured reactor – BILLIE

In the current context of technological, energy and ecological transition, there is an urgent need to develop more sustainable and cost effective synthetic processes: flow biocatalysis, combination of biocatalysis and continuous flow chemistry, has emerged as a winning combination. It allows significant decrease in production steps, reduced energy use, higher flexibility, higher productivity and safer operation. If a range of immobilization methods for isolated enzymes already exist, whole cell immobilization techniques are now emerging to simplify the catalysis process. To pave the way to future industrial applications, and in particular in pharmaceuticals, more complete and in depth understanding of the biocatalyst behaviour in continuous flow processes have to be conducted to unlock bottlenecks such as heat and mass transfer limitations, pressure drops, and mixing issues.
So as to transpose enzymatic batch reactions towards continuous and sustainable processes, BILLIE will capitalize on its partners’ complementary expertise in enzyme identification, enzyme and microorganism immobilization, transposition from batch towards continuous reactors and bioprocess scale-up. More precisely, BILLIE will focus on nitrilases and their implementation in flow biocatalytic processes using both isolated enzymes and recombinant whole cell biocatalysts. If the immobilization of enzymes allows increasing productivity and reducing downstream process, the step forwards will be to achieve the immobilization of the whole cells in the same (and thus versatile) milli-scale reactor to avoid expensive enzyme purification steps.