International enzyme technology firm Novozymes, which has a major presence in North Carolina, could earn big paydays from GlaxoSmithKline over coming years.

GSK (NYSE: GSK), which maintains its North American headquarters in RTP, filed for approval of a new diabetes drug last week in Europe.

And Novozymes, the world’s largest enzymes maker, stands to benefit, getting a return on a pharmaceutical investment of more than $200 million.

The Danish company will get a royalty in the low- to mid- single digit percentage range of sales from supplying technology that prolongs the life of the drug while in the body, Svend Licht, business development manager of Novozymes’s Biopharma unit, said in an interview with Bloomberg news.

GSK submitted an application to begin marketing the drug in Europe under the name Eperzan last week after finishing testing.

While soaking up research money, pharmaceutical ingredients only accounts for 1 percent of Novozymes’s $1.9 billion in sales, and new drugs can take 10 years or more to get to market. Novozymes, based in Bagsvaerd, Denmark, has tied with others such as Teva Pharmaceutical Industries as they look to improve the performance of treatments.

“It will be a validation for all the effort put into it,” Licht said in the March 8 interview by phone. “We have believed that it will happen but the proof of the pudding is when it actually comes to market.”

Novozymes stock has risen 27 percent since the start of this year.

Fooling the Body

The technology promises to increase the active life of the diabetes drug, meaning type 2 diabetes sufferers could inject once a week instead of daily. Novozymes uses genetically modified proteins that allow GSK to fuse its drug with albumin found in blood serum, fooling the body into accepting the active ingredients that it would normally deem foreign and expel.

Novozymes acquired the albufuse technology used in the GSK drug when it purchased Delta Biotechnology from Sanofi in 2006. The Danish company’s scientists, working in a laboratory in the U.K., have incorporated even more flexibility into a newer second-generation version that’s already been adopted by some drugmakers, Licht said, declining to name the companies because the relationships haven’t been made public yet.

Novozymes is also supplying technology for a cancer treatment of Israeli drugmaker Teva.

Novozymes’s latest version of the technology would allow pharmaceutical makers to control the periods between doses, whether shortening or lengthening the time, Licht said. For GSK’s albiglutide drug, the “holy grail” would be injecting the medication on a once-a-month basis, he said.

Novozymes New CEO

Novozymes, which operates its North American headquarters in Franklinton, will have a new CEO as of April 1. Peder Holk Nielsen will succeed long-time CEO Steen Riisgaard as of April 1.

Novozymes develops enzymes for use in biofuels as well as some 30 other industries.