Fast Flow peptide synthesis – The route to difficult peptides and scale up

Introduction
Largely, thanks to the recent success demonstrated by peptide drugs, such as Semaglutide and Tirzepatide, in the treatment of type-II diabetes and weight loss, there has been a significant shift in the pharmaceutical landscape towards peptides-based therapeutics. resulting from the improvement in the pharmacokinetic properties of peptide drugs, the peptide market is growing almost twice as fast as the “small molecule” market (1). There is now an increasing need to be able to quickly produce hundreds of grams of target peptides to satisfy the needs of pre-clinical and clinical trials. At this stage of the research cycle, time is of the essence, as short synthetic times will help maximising the life of the patent at the commercial stage of the drug.

For the synthesis of peptides in the discovery and pre-clinical development stages, scientists often rely on SPPS as a convenient route for the synthesis. Traditional batch technologies often give poor performance in situations where: