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The reluctance to technological growth in peptides - with Rodney Lax

Posted by on 09 April 2018
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We sat down with Rodney Lax, PhD, business consultant at PolyPeptide Group, during TIDES  to discuss how the peptides field has changed in the last three decades and what the future looks like. Read some of the key takeaways or watch the full interview below.

How has the peptide field evolved over the last 20 to 30 years?

"If you're talking about peptides then you're basically talking about polypeptides, which has less than fifty amino acids. Over the last 20-30 years, of course we've seen a lot of new peptides therapeutics being approved. We've been adding them at a rate of about 2 to 3 a year. We've also seen the quantities of peptides, which are being manufactured, going up considerably. The continual annual growth rate has been about 7.6 for approved peptides therapeutics. Of course, there have been changes in the way we make peptides as well.

There haven't really been enormous changes in the chemistry, if you're looking at shorter peptides - say peptides less than ten amino acids. It's  probably going to be a choice between solution phase and solid phase. If it's above ten amino acids you're probably going to use Fmoc based solid phase synthesis technology, although there are still some peptides being manufactured using TBOT technology.

What we've also seen is that recombinant expressions become a method of manufacturing  peptides. There are peptides like calcitonin PTH, BNP and one or two others which are shorter than 50 amino acids but which are made recombinantly."

What difficulties are there with technological growth in the industry?

"One of the things we do notice is the enormous reluctance within the industry to change technology. So, it's really quite surprising when that Fmoc technology is much safer and much more flexible than TBOT chemistry. But we still have a number of peptides being made by TBOT  chemistry and the reason for that is partly the reluctance to change to other methodology because our knowledge base is with the previous technology which has been out there.

It's also the cost of raw materials, Fmoc amino acids were more expensive than TBOT amino acids when the technology was first introduced. But a lot of it is due to the reluctance of sponsors to actually change technology because if the product's approved, it means that they have to re-register the product. Some of these products have maybe 30 or 50 registrations, and each registration change could cost half a million to a million dollars.

So you can understand the reluctance to move from one technology to another. And that of course is telling us something. It's telling us that we're unlikely to see any major changes in the near future and it wouldn't surprise me if Fmoc chemistry was the method of choice in 30 or 50 years time."

Dr. Lax also presented on 'Redefining the Therapeutic Peptide Business in the 21st Century' which you can watch here.

This year's TIDES is taking place on May 7-10, 2018 in Boston.  Download the agenda here

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