FUNAMBULIST aims at bringing
DNA is a chiral molecule. This means that it cannot be superimposed with its mirror image, like it happens with our own hands.
Many pharmaceutical drugs or their precursors are also chiral, ie, there exist two mirror structures of the same molecule. The problem is that often only one of both is therapeutically active.
And sometimes the other may even do significant harm.
About 13 years ago, it was shown that DNA-based asymmetric catalysis could pave the way to synthesise chiral drugs or their precursors in a very efficient way, i.e. with a high enantiomeric excess. However, the proof of concept has remained on the laboratory scale and the synthesis sometimes requires conditions that cancel out the potential advantage of using DNA. This has strongly hampered the breakthrough of this ingenious concept.
The chemical synthesis of chiral drugs usually leads to a mixture of the two mirror structures. This makes necessary a posterior elaborate purification procedure which is costly and energy-intensive. A targeted stereospecific synthesis of these drugs from the start would significantly streamline the chiral drug production.
Our focus is to tackle existing bottlenecks to bring DNA-based catalysis to the industrial scale – from the molecular basis of the synthesis of DNA-based catalysis to the engineering of implementing this concept in a process. For this purpose, we have joined a creative and competent team of experts in their respective fields. Our aim is to achieve the breakthrough in DNA-based catalysis on the industrial scale.