Researches have possibly discovered that fast synthesis could possibly boost drug development. Researchers are saying that peptides can be used a s drugs because they can be designed for very specific functions in cells. Insulin and Fuzeon a drug used for HIV are some of the first successful examples. Peptide drugs are expected to become a twenty five billion dollar market by 2018. There is one problem that is stopping peptide drugs from reaching their full potential, and that is that peptides take several weeks to make and and it is hard to make a large quantity of them at once. A group of MIT chemists and chemical engineers has designed a way to create peptides in a few hours. Peptides are used in therapeutics, they are found in hydrogels, and they are used to control drug delivery. They are also used as biological probes view cancer and to study the process of cells. Therapeutic peptides usually consist of a chain of thirty to forty amino acids. Many universities have facilities to manufacture peptides, but it can take anywhere from two to six weeks. Engineers are attempting to create new machinery to speed up the process of manufacturing peptides to only a little over an hour.
Link: http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2014/03/19/fast_synthesis_could_boost_drug_development.html
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Rodney Lax, Ph.D., Senior Director of Business Development North America, PolyPeptide Group, has been working with peptide for over 40 years. He assumes that there are between 500-600 peptide drugs in the pre- clinical development. the U S has spent millions if dollars on the study of peptide drugs, we can only hope that the outcome is postive.
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If this research is successful the impact on the world would be huge. It would help many more people because there would be more of the medicine. It would also reduce the price because there would be so much of it. The reduced price would be good because then we would be able to eradicate diseases in the whole world.
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