Peptides As Drugs

Peptides are small protein fragments and are good in drugs because they can be designed for specific functions in cells. Two examples of drugs that have successfully used peptides are Insulin and the HIV drug Fuzeon.

The only bad part about peptides is that it takes several weeks to manufacture them. This makes it difficult to get large quantities of them and to test their overall effectiveness.

However, a team of chemical engineers and chemists at MIT have recently designed a way to manufacture them in a few hours. This will have a huge impact on biological science because peptides can be used for many things.

Some uses for peptides include: therapeutics, they are found in hydrogels, control drug delivery, used as probes when searching for cancer, and help us study processes in cells.

Using the same technology to synthesize the peptides, scientists will be able to combine the peptides to form large synthetic proteins.

Due to the success of this experiment, 9 more machines will be created to synthesize 100,000 to 500,000 custom peptides a year, just enough to meet the demand.

Scientists combine amino acids to form the small fragments

NOS Themes:

Science is collaborative

Science is based on evidence

Role of credibility

Role of motivation and curiosity

My article: 

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2014/03/19/fast_synthesis_could_boost_drug_development.html