Unilever partners with Arzeda on enzymes for cleaning

The enzyme development start-up Arzeda has landed a partnership with the consumer goods giant Unilever to develop enzymes for household cleaning applications.

Many dish detergents and hard surface cleaners already use enzymes, which can break down soils, oils, and other grime as well as boost the performance of other ingredients. Enzymes, along with live microbes and advanced surfactants, are central to Unilever’s $1.2 billion plan to shift to 100% biobased ingredients for its cleaning products by 2030.

Neil Parry, head of biotechnology development at Unilever, says the firm has the opportunity with Arzeda to look beyond the capacities of natural enzymes and into new kinds of enzyme-catalyzed cleaning chemistry. “Although detergents have been around for a long time with enzymes in them, the enzyme classes are quite limited,” he says, “and we believe there’s so many more enzyme classes that can get performance.”

Parry says Unilever is interested both in enzymes that are part of final consumer products, like lipases that break down grease in dish detergent, and those that improve the company’s manufacturing processes, such as the saponification of oils and fats into soaps.

Arzeda combines physics-based protein design with deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to improve enzymes or even build them from scratch. “Our impact on the field of enzyme engineering is improving the manufacturability and performance of existing classes, and then creating new classes of function, new modes of action,” says Alexandre Zanghellini, Arzeda’s founder and CEO.

Parry says the venture is part of Unilever’s goal of eliminating petroleum-derived ingredients. “You start taking the chemical load away; what are you going to replace it with?” he says. “This is making sure that the enzyme classes go across the different functionalities that petrochemicals give us today.”

Though the firms declined to discuss the financial details of the 3-year collaboration, Parry and Zanghellini both describe the scale as “significant.” Zanghellini says it fits well with his strategy of working closely with a small number of market leaders. “We have a couple of key partners which are making significant commitments, not only on the financial side but also on bringing these products to market,” he says. For example, Arzeda is working with Amyris and BP on biobased chemicals.

Arzeda raised $15.2 million in a series A funding round in 2017, and Zanghellini says the company has invested around $30 million overall in developing its platform and technology. The Seattle-based firm employs roughly 40 people “and is growing rapidly,” he says. About 35% of its research staff comes from a computer science background and the rest from chemistry and biology.

Enzymes are a hot area for chemical manufacturing. Just this year, DSM began testing enzymatic production of food and flavor ingredients with the start-up Debut Biotechnology, the start-up Allozymes raised $5 million for its droplet-microfluidics-based enzyme screening technology, and the start-up EnginZyme raised $13 million for its immobilized-enzyme chemical synthesis platform.