Nature Biotechnology has written about us

26.11.2007 17:57

Our resarch has been mentioned in a prestigious journal – Nature Biotechnology.

Brady Huggett has writen for Nature Biotechnology in November 2007:

Mustard gas enzyme

Enantis, a Brno, Czech Republic–based biotech, is preparing to launch its first product, haloalkane dehalogenase, an engineered enzyme that converts toxic sulphur mustard (yperite), also called mustard gas, to nontoxic thiodiglycol by a hydrolytic mechanism. The enzyme, to be called Yperzyme, was developed in Loschmidt Laboratories in the Faculty of Science at Masaryk University in Brno, and Enantis has licensed in the Czech patent, issued in August to the university.The product is expected to be tested by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against enzymatic decontamination mixtures by the end of the year. Zbynek Prokop, managing director at Enantis, says the enzyme is being developed for use on sensitive military facilities and on human skin, and also for disposing old stocks of mustard gas. Enantis has been in preliminary partnering discussions with Genencor, of Rochester, New York, and although there are no contracts in place for using the product, the potential is there: both the US and Russia have large stockpiles of mustard gas to destroy. Enantis, founded in January by Prokop and Jiří Damborský, also a managing director at Enantis, has 19 part-time researchers, but will begin employing full-time staff in 2008. It is part of a small but growing biotech contingency in the Czech Republic. In 2000, there were 45 biotech companies in the country; that has reached 60 today, and the government last year spent CZK22 ($1) billion fostering biotech R&D, says Marketa Luhanova, department of investment development at CzechInvest in Prague

Read this article online at Nature Biotechnology, 25 (11), 2007 as either HTML or PDF

Nature Biotechnology has written about us

Mustard gas enzyme

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