American Peptide Company (APC), a specialist in peptide manufacturing and peptide-based services, has formed a new research and development group. The group will be based at the company's facility in Sunnyvale, California, and will be tasked with developing innovative new products and services.
Peptide drugs are rapidly increasing in complexity, now requiring challenging modifications, incorporating unnatural amino acids, and being linked to carrier molecules to enhance drug delivery efficacy. Designed for indications such as diabetes, HIV, Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer, peptides have tremendous therapeutic potential, but can be difficult to synthesise to the high quality and the necessary yield for research and commercial production.
Through industry collaborations the company has access to polysaccharide expertise that it can combine with its own peptide skills to provide new solutions to the drug development sector that are not available elsewhere in the market. Its ability to build long peptide sequences and undertake challenging conjugations can open the way to an increase in the half-life of the drug and improved solubility, said Firuz Shakoori, director of sales.
The r&d group has been instrumental in the development of the company's glycosylation technology, which is used to attach oligosaccharides to bioactive peptides or proteins and significantly enhances their therapeutic properties, increasing stability and solubility, reducing immunogenicity and better controlling internal clearance.
Likewise, the company's PEGylation technology, whereby a peptide is modified by attaching poly ethylene glycol, can significantly improve drug performance by mitigating immunogenicity, avoiding reticuloendothelial (RES) clearance, reducing renal filtration and increasing half-life in vivo.
"The new r&d group will better enable APC Company to meet the complex and evolving needs of our global customer base," said Takahiro Ogata, president and coo. The R&D group and the technological capabilities they offer will ultimately help our customers more effectively drive bioactive peptides identified as potential drug targets through the discovery and development phase."
In April the company completed a major expansion that saw the addition of four Class 100,000 purification rooms and two Class 10,000 packaging rooms. The equipment is large enough to produce peptides in kilo quantities, giving the company the ability to supply in quantities from grams to multi kilos.
Some six projects for long sequence peptides are currently underway, said Shakoori, and results are expected within the next year. The r&d group now enable APC to offer peptide services from discovery through process development and scale-up to commercial production under one roof.