eXoZymes Selected As Core Industry Partner In $9M NSF-Funded Initiative To Advance Modular Cell-Free Biomanufacturing

Today, eXoZymes Inc. ("eXoZymes") - a pioneer of AI-engineered enzymes that can transform sustainable feedstock into nutraceuticals, medicines, and other essential chemicals - announced its role in the Meta-PURE initiative, a $9.2M USD National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project under the CFIRE program aimed at transforming the scalability and accessibility of cell-free systems to expand real-world applications.

Led by Georgia Tech with a coalition of top academic and industry groups, Meta-PURE will build a suite of standardized, interoperable ‘modules' for cell-free biomanufacturing, enabling plug-and-play modules that can rapidly shift between use cases - from high-value nutraceuticals, to essential chemicals or pharmaceuticals. eXoZymes' contribution builds on its proven ability to design complex enzyme cascades that operate outside of cells at unprecedented yields.

"Our job in Meta-PURE is to build a cell-free power plant - an ATP-generating module that other teams can plug into to drive their own production modules," said Dr. Paul Opgenorth, co-founder of eXoZymes and co-principal investigator on the award. Dr. Opgenorth continues, "By decoupling the power module from the production module, we're enabling faster reaction times, greater product yields, and making the development of production modules more accessible for our partners across a broad spectrum of synthetic biology applications."

For Meta-PURE, eXoZymes - formerly known as Invizyne Technologies - will serve as the key industrial partner, with a $3M share of the total award, and will develop a cell free ATP-generating module - essentially a cell-free power plant - that fuels different chemical production modules to be developed now and in the future, supporting cell-free manufacturing of several market-relevant targets.

In addition, eXoZymes' role also includes developing a production module for santalene, an extremely high-value fragrance compound, traditionally extracted from sandalwood for use in aromatherapy and traditional medicine formulations. Furthermore, derivates of santalene have been investigated in pharmaceutical use cases.

Other coalition partners will develop targets spanning a wide range of complexity and markets, but all relying on eXoZymes' plug-and-play cell-free power plant, which will be tested and optimized to both purified and lysate-based exozymes biosolutions to ensure compatibility and performance.

About The Meta-PURE Initiative
Meta-PURE is part of NSF Advancing Cell-Free Systems Toward Increased Range of Use-Inspired Applications (CFIRE) program and supported under Cooperative Agreement No. 2452482. It is designed to lay foundational infrastructure for a flexible, cost-effective, and robust U.S. bioeconomy. Work under this program will commence on July 1, 2025 and will run for three years.

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

About eXoZymes
Founded in 2019, the company has developed a biomanufacturing platform that - as a historic first - offers the tools and insights to design, engineer, control and optimize nature's own natural processes to produce chemical compounds, enabling the company's partners to replace traditional petro-chemical production methods with a new commercially scalable, sustainable, and eco-friendly alternative: exozymes.

Exozymes are advanced enzymes enhanced through AI and bioengineering to thrive in a bioreactor outside of living cells. Exozymes can replace toxic petrochemical processes and inefficient biochemical extraction with sustainable and scalable biosolutions that transform biomass into essential chemicals, medicines, and biofuels.

By freeing enzyme-driven chemical reactions from the limitations imposed by cells, exozyme biosolutions eliminate the scaling bottleneck that has hampered commercial success in the synthetic biology (SynBio) space, making exozymes the next generation of biomanufacturing.

While the company, eXoZymes Inc., has introduced "exozymes" as a scientific concept, they are not trademarking the concept, as they view it as a new nomenclature for wide adoption for this next generation of biomanufacturing that eXoZymes aims to pioneer and be the market leader of.

For more information, visit exozymes.com