Peptide drugs cover a broad range, from traditional medications like insulin to the current excitement over GLP-1 agonists to treat obesity. Recently, Wenjun Li, PhD, a researcher at the Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research in China, and his colleagues reviewed the ups and downs of peptide processing.
Drugs based on peptides can potentially treat a wide range of health problems, from bacterial infections and diabetes to cancer and cardiac disease. “A key advantage of peptide drugs is their diverse functional groups, large surface area, and chirality, which results in a large contact area with target proteins,” Li’s team noted. “These attributes can be used to interact at multiple distant sites to activate the drug target.” Moreover, these scientists pointed out that peptide drugs can be extremely target-specific and therapeutically effective.
To produce peptide drugs many manufacturers rely on chemical synthesis. Nonetheless, Li and his colleagues pointed out key limitations to this approach: “The chemical synthesis method has drawbacks of many synthesis steps, high purification cost, and serious reagent contamination.”
Alternatively, peptide drugs can be made through biosynthesis. Here, scientists start with the natural pathway that produces the peptide. Then, a host—from bacteria and yeast to mammalian cells—can be engineered to produce the desired peptide. The biosynthetic approach offers some advantages over chemical synthesis. For example, Li’s team stated that making peptide drugs with “microbial cell factories” is more economical and greener.
Although setting up an efficient system of bioprocessing peptide drugs takes some work, Li and his colleagues explained that a “combination of biosensors as expression elements enables directed evolution and high-throughput screening of rate-limiting enzymes in the biosynthetic pathway, and makes the enzymes better adapt to the intracellular environment of the chassis cells.”
No approach to drug processing is perfect, but as Li’s team concluded: “Biosynthesis technology will be the key to promoting the industrial production of peptide drugs.” If the explosion of using GLP-1 agonists against obesity continues, manufacturers will need every advantage they can get in producing tomorrow’s peptide drugs.
