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Comment by libdong | Hacker News Reader

It's really nice to see startups working on industrial processes here

AFAIK the main problem with enzymes as catalysts beyond the bench scale is their limited lifetime. How is the half-life of your enzymes at operating conditions? I'm just curious how the process works in real life (so are probably your potential customers).

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haha yes, we do hear recurring revenue here. Enzymes are indeed fragile relative to metals and have limited lifetimes. However, even metals like palladium leach, sinter, get poisoned, etc. In the current process, many facilities have to continually regenerate their palladium catalysts. The beauty of working with enzymes in the here and now is that we have the tools to continuously optimize them and continuously make them cheaper. We are improving our enzyme lifetimes with each new batch, and we envision being able to release new and improved enzymes to our customers every year

That doesn't answer the question. Even if you're still tweaking things today, what do you expect the useful lifetime of a batch of your enzymes to be, say, a year from now?

more than a month. Best to think of it in terms of H2O2 turnovers per enzyme. Imagine if we made a new enzyme that had 10x faster turnovers but a 5x lower lifetime. Assuming we could still keep up with its oxygen demands, that is a better enzyme despite a lower lifetime.

You say limited lifetime, startups hear recurring revenue ;)

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