eversyn: Human Sugars for the New Generation of Baby Food

19:40 Uhr / 7.40 p.m., FutureHeads Lecture in English, Ministerium für Infrastruktur und Digitales, Elbe-Office, Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Straße 2,  2. OG/2nd floor

Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) play an important role in the healthy development of infants and reduce the risk of intestinal infections. These naturally occurring molecules have a large variety, more than 200 known structures, and producing them outside of the human cell can be very challenging. A few have been successfully introduced to the market as additives to premium milk formula products, but the processes being used are very limited when it comes to producing more complex structures. There is immense interest to synthesize these complex structures and investigate their specific functions, developing an efficient way to produce such molecules will potentially harbor the next generation of infant formulas and gut microbiome supplements.

The state of the art for HMO production is the use of fermentation production systems, using genetically modified bacteria or yeast in a bioreactor, and has only been developed successfully for the synthesis of a few simple structures. In contrast, in-vitro enzymatic synthesis allows us to synthesize a wide variety of HMOs with a substrate to product conversion yield of over 90%. However, this synthesis approach relies on using activated sugars as building blocks. Nowadays, the price for such activated sugars is a bottleneck for production anywhere beyond milligram amounts. Our platform can use inexpensive starting materials and produce activated sugars that can be then used to synthetize HMOs, making the whole platform economically viable. As an example, CMP-Neu5Ac (a nucleotide sugar worth now over 35,000 € per gram) could be produced with a final titer of 57 g/L within 8 hours.

Sachsen-Anhalt is a very fertile ground for the development of high-tech startup companies and offers a rich ecosystem with partnering and funding opportunities. The activated sugars and selected human milk oligosaccharides will be commercially available through the Max Planck Society spin-off company eversyn®.

Speaker: Edgar Alberto Alcalá Orozco, eversyn Bioprocess Development // Research group Bioprocess Engineering