Steroid biotransformation technology has made great breakthroughs

Date: 2017-03-13 
Source: www.cncbd.org.cn
Contributor: Industrial Biotechnology Department 
Author: Administrator 
Category: Independent writing

Steroid hormone drugs are the second largest variety after antibiotics. The total value of steroid drugs worldwide is nearly 50 billion US dollars, accounting for 6% of the world's pharmaceutical sales. China is the main producer of steroid drug raw materials and preparations, with an annual output value of nearly 80 billion yuan. Although my country is a big country in the steroid hormone drug industry, it is not a strong country. The steroid drug industry faces many development bottlenecks such as serious pollution in the extraction process and lack of plant-derived raw materials. Exploring the biotransformation synthesis of steroid compounds may be an important way to promote the transformation and upgrading of the steroid drug industry.

With the support of the major projects of the National 12th Five-Year Plan 863 Program, Tianjin Pharmaceutical Group, together with the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiangnan University and other advantageous units, carried out joint research on key biotransformation technology research and industrial application around important steroid intermediates, an important hormone drug, and eliminated the pollution and other defects caused by chemical methods, optimized and improved the key technology of preparing 4-AD from plant sterols through one-step biofermentation (Figure 1), broke through the technical system of preparing trihydroxyandrostenone by biocatalytic dihydroxylation of dehydroepiandrosterone (Figure 2), innovated a new method for the synthesis of drospirenone, opened up the biological route for preparing 7-dehydrocholesterol from one-step biotransformation of cholesterol, and established a process for preparing 4-cholesten-3-one from cholesterol with high efficiency. Thanks to the breakthroughs in the above technologies, the conversion rate of steroid products has been greatly improved, the production cost has been reduced by 40-50%, the energy consumption and water resource consumption have been reduced by more than 30%, and the emission of environmental pollutants has been reduced by more than 30%, which has effectively promoted the transformation and technological improvement of my country's steroid chemical industry and provided new impetus for the sustainable development of my country's steroid drug industry.