Fermentation in Pharmaceuticals

BOC Sciences is a leading fermentation CDMO, and we provide custom fermentation development services to meet the needs of our pharmaceutical industry clients, from the discovery of new natural products to the large-scale fermentation production of known pharmaceutical active ingredients (APIs). Our fermentation APIs cover a wide range of areas including anticancer, antibacterial, antifungal, antioxidant, antiviral, and antidiabetic.

What is Fermentation in Pharmaceuticals?

Microbial fermentation is the basis of pharmaceuticals, and the application of fermentation in pharmaceuticals mainly refers to the process of using the growth and reproduction of microorganisms to synthesize active molecules through metabolism, biotransformation, and then separation and extraction, and refinement and purification. The microorganisms that produce drugs mainly include bacteria, actinomycetes and filamentous fungi, as well as Pseudomonas, Bacillus, Mucor, Cyanobacteria, etc. With the development of biotechnology, especially the rise of biotechnology such as genome sequencing, genetic engineering, protein engineering and metabolic engineering, there is still a broad prospect of obtaining new natural products from microorganisms.

Microbial drugs are classified into three categories according to their sources: drugs derived from microbial entities as a whole or in part, microbial primary metabolites, and microbial secondary metabolites.

Microbial Entities by Fermentation

Drugs derived from microbial whole or partial entities include vaccines, toxoids, antitoxins, etc.

Primary Metabolites by Fermentation

Amino acids, nucleotides and non-organism constituents such as coenzymes and vitamins that constitute the macromolecular backbone of microbial organisms, as well as organic acids and alcohols related to material metabolism and energy metabolism.

Secondary Metabolites by Fermentation

The secondary metabolites produced by microorganisms have a wide variety of biological activities and can play an important role in human health, animal health, and pest control in agriculture as active pharmaceutical ingredients for anticancer, antibacterial, antifungal, antioxidant, antiviral, antidiabetic, immunosuppressive agents, as well as antiparasitic agents, herbicides and feed additives. Among them, antibiotics are the most important class of secondary metabolites derived from microorganisms that play a role in the control of infections, treatment of cancer, etc.

Our Fermentation Services for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Our Methods

The biosynthesis of microbial natural products is a gene-to-compound process. The synthetic potential of novel secondary metabolites encoded by unexplored silencing pathways within the microbial genome far exceeds the number of metabolites that have been discovered. The discovery and isolation of novel compounds from microorganisms is one of the main methods for the development of novel drugs. The combination of bioinformatics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and other related technologies is currently a fast and effective method for discovering novel natural products.

Why Choose BOC Sciences?

Powerful fermentation capabilities

We offer over 100,000 liters of large-scale fermentation capacity with well-established downstream processing, performing all tests from raw material to final product. Our quality control extends through every step of the APIs fermentation process, from the laboratory to the production facility, in compliance with GMP standards.

Rational design

We use bioinformatics to predict the biosynthetic gene clusters that may produce secondary metabolites, then predict the approximate physicochemical properties of the products, further activate or heterologously express the gene clusters, and finally isolate and identify the target products.

High-throughput screening

High-throughput screening of microbial strains to obtain strains with specific properties can be performed on strains isolated from nature, mutated strains of the original strains, or engineered strains modified by biotechnology. The concentration of the target product or each physiological and biochemical index of the strain is measured using various assay techniques to obtain positive strains, and then the final target strain is obtained by re-screening.