Stepping up: From lab scale to industrial processes

This article discusses the challenges faced by academic researchers in transitioning their enzyme-based processes from the lab scale to industrial-scale production. Key strategies highlighted include shifting the mindset around catalyst concentrations, overcoming solubility and stability issues through techniques like enzyme immobilization, leveraging continuous flow processing to enable high substrate loadings and easy catalyst recovery, and using appropriate productivity metrics to assess the efficiency of enzyme-based processes. The article emphasizes that with the right approaches, academic researchers can successfully scale up their enzyme-based technologies without necessarily having an engineering background.