A Novel Enzymatic Microreactor: Towards Transforming the Pharmaceutical Industry

Offering many fundamental and practical advantages of relevance for today’s chemical and biological industry, microreactors are rapidly replacing round-bottomed flasks in modern biochemical labs. Compared to the batch processing, microreactors can offer precise control of reaction variables, high-throughput scanning of reaction conditions, increased safety parameters and they require small quantities of reagents. These miniaturized devices are widely used to facilitate routine work in biochemical analysis and also have applications in biocatalysis where they are termed as enzymatic microreactors. In this work, enzymatic microreactors are used to ease characterization of CaLB enzyme activity as a function of a substrate concentration. The work demonstrates potential of Lab-on-a-Chip devices with enzymatic microreactors as an evolving platforms for performing reliable on-chip biocatalyctic measurements and a possible foundation for future flow-chemistry based industrialization.