At TIDES (May 2018) we sat down with Michael Karney, Life Science Product Manager at CEM Corporation, for TIDES TV. Karney discussed current challenges in the way peptides are manufactured and the work CEM is doing to improve these processes.
What peptide challenges are you currently seeing in the industry?
MK: 'One of the biggest challenges in the SPPS industry is really the wasteful time consuming optimization that's involved in the normal process of making a peptide. So the current approach is really a shock on approach; try a bunch of different activators, screen a bunch of deprotection reagents, solvents, and it's unnecessary. It's not a methodical, well thought out work flow. Being able to make the optimization a little bit easier is one of the biggest challenges to overcome.'
What aspect of these challenges do you think can be changed, and how is CEM helping to make those changes?
MK: 'I think on the chemistry side of things, the workflow can be greatly improved. But also when it comes to SPPS, and automation for synthesizers, that can be improved as well. So on the chemistry side rather than worrying about this needless, tedious optimization, run methodologies which are tried-and-true, and that have been well-developed to work generally for a number of different applications.
With CEM what we typically do is we'll spend a lot of time with our research chemist and our scientists running many, many different peptide sequences, developing these robust technologies that work for a wide variety of peptides that are out there. We then take this chemistry optimization and couple it then to hardware improvements. So we make systems run more efficiently, more reliably, much faster. Our most recent system that we've released, the Liberty Prime system, does just that.'
Could you summarize what that new Liberty Prime means to industry chemists?
MK: 'The Liberty Prime really means an overall simplification of their workflow. So on the chemistry side I'd mentioned pre-optimized methods that come from our scientists, which means they don't need to run tens or hundreds of reactions to screen all these activators and different reagents and solvents. It means simplified workflow because it's a sequential process.
So the prime system generates single peptides extremely quickly, which fits in perfectly with sequential purification workflow and it also means an overall safer and more efficient type of synthesis. It's well vetted for using no calibration and there's no maintenance required for the system, so it makes life a lot easier for a chemist overall, it makes them more productive.
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