Saturday, March 21, 2009

Applications of Peptides and Proteins

In the human body, most if not all biological/ physiological processes are regulated by various forms of molecular recognition. Most of these processes involve initiation or inhibition trough protein-protein interaction. As we know peptides and proteins due to the vast number of conformational possibilities are ideal to carry out such complex control functions. The last 40 years have seen an enormous growth in the methodologies available to obtain peptide and protein molecules. Through recombinant methods, most labs can now assemble genes, subcloned them into expression vectors and obtain a wide range of endogenous proteins; likewise the pioneering work of Bruce Merrifield, makes it possible to obtain multikilo amounts of a number of biologically active peptides.

However, the number of peptides that have entered the pharmaceutical market is relatively low; perhaps due to a number of reasons, among them: antigenicity, immunogenicity , bioavailability and stability of the product upon administration into the patient. To some degree the relative scarcity of large scale peptide production plants that can make the peptide products in large amounts (perhaps at the ton levels) at more affordable costs, have also been a factor.

The good news is that in the last few years, after the completion of the human genome project, there have been more targets that are being worked on and the numbers of GMP facilities and the cost for GMP peptides have been continuously improving. Our forecast is that synthetic peptide chemistry will be an important source of many medically/clinically relevant peptides and proteins in the years to come.

Bio-Synthesis has been producing synthetic peptides for over 25 years. Our expertise in custom synthetic polypeptide manufacturing allows us to produce the high-quality, large-scale, and GMP peptides with the highest success rate with long standing records. We have been delivered more than 100,000 peptides to customers worldwide, including very hydrophobic polypeptide, peptide with multiple disulfide bonds, multi-phosph0rylated peptides and extremely long peptides. Our large scale non-GMP ever delivered 5 kilograms of peptides on a single order and has the capacity of 10,000 peptides per month. Our capacity of GMP peptide is 10 kilograms.

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