PANEL DISCUSSION ON PEPTIDES

PEPTIDE DRUG DISCOVERY AND PROCESS DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES

The peptide market will show incredible performances growing from the actual 30 Bdollar to the 58 Bdollar by the year 2026. This jump is directly related to the improvement of the drug design and development process achieved during the last 10 years (1). In fact, not long time ago, once the active peptide was identified, the drug, a peptidomimetic molecule, was obtained after an extensive medicinal chemistry program. Nowadays, with a few modifications of the natural sequence, it is possible to generate analogue peptides with a controlled conformation and an improved pharmaceutical profile, like long half-life and oral delivery.

DRUG DISCOVERY
In the medicinal chemistry scenario, peptides had often been discarded as potential lead compounds because they were affected by several well-known issues. In particular, the sensitivity to proteolytic enzymatic degradation generally determined half-lives of few minutes and the need to be administered by intravenous injection made oral administration a challenge. Moreover, random conformations of short sequences and difficulties in synthesis and purification of longer ones discouraged investments in this modality.