Spanish biotech SME bridging enzyme engineering and ML-driven enzyme discovery for sustainable industrial and food-sector bioprocesses.
Sustainable Momentum is a Spanish biotech SME specializing in industrial enzyme engineering and sustainable bioprocess development for chemical synthesis. They contribute specialist expertise to R&D consortia working on enzyme-driven reactions — particularly C-C bond-forming cascades, thermostabilization, and biocatalytic scale-up for producing bulk chemicals and active pharmaceutical ingredients. More recently, they have expanded into enzyme discovery using metagenomics, microfluidics, and machine learning to identify and optimize novel enzymes for greener industrial and consumer products. Their work sits at the junction of green chemistry and biotechnology, translating enzyme science into scalable, sustainable production processes.
Both CARBAZYMES and RADICALZ centre on engineering and deploying enzymes — from optimizing specific classes (lyases, aldolases, halohydrin dehalogenases) in the first project to broader protein engineering for novel applications in the second.
CARBAZYMES targeted sustainable industrial processes for bulk chemical and API production; RADICALZ explicitly addresses bioprocess sustainability for greener consumer products.
In CARBAZYMES, their keyword profile includes microreactor, technical scale, and cascade reactions, indicating hands-on involvement in translating bench-scale enzymatic reactions to process-relevant conditions.
RADICALZ (2021-2025) introduced metagenomics and microfluidics to their toolkit, reflecting a shift toward high-throughput discovery of novel enzymes from environmental samples.
RADICALZ keywords include machine learning alongside protein engineering, suggesting adoption of computational tools to guide enzyme design and optimization.
In their first H2020 project (CARBAZYMES, 2015-2019), Sustainable Momentum worked on specific enzyme classes — lyases, aldolases, and halohydrin dehalogenases — for C-C bond-forming reactions, focusing on enzyme panel construction, thermostabilization, and scale-up in microreactors to produce APIs and bulk chemicals. By RADICALZ (2021-2025), the focus had shifted from optimizing known enzymes to discovering new ones: metagenomics for mining environmental diversity, microfluidics for high-throughput screening, and machine learning to guide protein engineering decisions. The trajectory is clear and consistent — from precision engineering of defined enzyme classes toward data-driven, large-scale enzyme discovery.
They are moving toward data-intensive, high-throughput enzyme discovery — organizations working on biomanufacturing, synthetic biology, or green chemistry pipelines would find them an increasingly capable partner as these methods mature into industrial practice.
Sustainable Momentum has participated in both H2020 projects as a consortium partner, never as coordinator — a pattern typical of specialist SMEs that contribute focused technical expertise rather than managing large programmes. With 24 unique partners across 8 countries, they have joined genuinely international consortia, suggesting comfort operating in multi-partner, multi-national settings. This profile points to a focused contributor that fits best as a specialist node in larger research consortia rather than as a consortium driver.
They have built connections with 24 unique partners spanning 8 countries through just two projects, reflecting genuine European reach for an SME of this size. Their network is broad rather than deep — no repeated partner relationships are visible in a two-project portfolio, suggesting they adapt to new consortia rather than anchoring a stable research cluster.
Based in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria — an unusual location for an industrial biotech SME — Sustainable Momentum covers both the wet-lab enzyme engineering side (C-C bond platforms, cascade reactions, microreactor scale-up) and the computational discovery side (metagenomics, microfluidics, ML-guided protein engineering), spanning a wider stretch of the enzyme development pipeline than is typical for a small company. Few SMEs of this size bridge classical biocatalysis and modern enzyme discovery methods, making them a versatile contributor to consortia that need cross-disciplinary expertise without the overhead of a large research institution.
