BIOPROSP_23

Dr Milla Koistinaho is a founding partner of a new €90 million venture capital fund, managed by Innovestor Life Science Oy, and invests in strong health sciences based companies in the Nordics and Baltics. She will talk about her own path from being a researcher to an entrepreneur and eventually to her current role as an investment professional in life sciences. She will share insight and tips to the audience regarding what to consider on the way to commercialize research results and what are investors’ expectations from the research team when spinning out companies stemming from academic research.

Digital bioprospecting for exploring biodiversity and discovering novel bioactive compounds and industrial enzymes

Characterising phorbazole fragments as pan-kinase inhibitors.

Combining OSMAC and metabologenomic approaches to discover novel biosurfactants from a marine Rhodococcus

Bioprospecting of Maldivian soft corals: chemical ecology and anticancer activity of their secondary metabolites

Unlocking the potential of the natural and artificial diversity for the bioeconomy using (ultra)high-throughput methods.

The application of enzymes in industrial processes is increasingly important to achieve the EU’s sustainability goals and strengthen the bioeconomy, replacing oil-based chemistry. Society demands more environment-friendly,healthier products and cleaner energy. While enzymes have the potential to meet these demands, they still find several hurdles for their industrial application: low success rates of discovery and engineering; tedious and expensive methods to explore diversity and limited activity/stability in the final application.

The microbial diversity represents an unfathomable source of enzymes for the bioeconomy, but only a small fraction can be cultivated. For this reason, it is an underexplored source of bioactive compounds, carbohydrate polymers and enzymes, among others. Sampling the natural microbial diversity, screening, identifying and isolating the relevant genes is cumbersome, expensive and results in a heavy environmental burden, low yields, high costs and long times to market, in particular if we opt for function-based, information-agnostic methods as a gateway to new diversity that could not be found otherwise.

Throughout the course of EU-funded proyects CarbaZymes, MetaFluidics, RadicalZ and BlueTools, we have been developing (and will develop) technology to overcome the limitations both for the study of microbial communities and their “econological use” and to tailor the discovered enzymes towards industrial applications. Our methods for enzyme discovery in the natural and artificial diversity make use of whole cells (in vivo) or cell-like compartments (in vitro) for recombinant expression, reducing the average time for enzyme discovery and evolution while increasing the amount of sampled sequence space.

On the way to a sustainable industry, enzymes will play a key role. It is our task to take the results of evolution as a starting point and put them to use for industrial purposes. Microorganisms have populated our planet for almost four billion years and evolution offers a wealth of fascinating opportunities. One part of nature’s toolbox is the intriguing world of enzymes. Enzymes are versatile helpmates for building, degrading and modifying molecules. Gaining access to nature’s toolbox and developing enzymes for industrial challenges is a multidisciplinary task. My talk will highlight enzyme development projects executed by BRAIN Biotech using methods from the fields of discovery, protein engineering, and microbial production. A focus will be on our large digital metagenomic database (SeqPool) - a powerful resource for enzyme discovery.

Improving organoleptic properties of fish protein hydrolysates through monooxygenase engineering

The award for best scientific poster is sponsored by Marine Drugs.