ASPIRATION · Soft Template Mediated Peptide Crystallisation
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-01 → 2023-09-30
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Soft Template Mediated Peptide Crystallisation
The action “Soft Template Mediated Peptide Crystallisation” involves establishing a program for process intensification and alleviating downstream processing bottlenecks. This is achieved through the implementation of a soft template strategy for continuous crystallisation, specifically designed for peptide purification. The overarching goal of this project is to revolutionise the personalised medicine sector by reducing production costs and enhancing the efficacy of peptide-based drugs. This is achieved by tailoring the amount of required peptide drugs based on individual patient needs. Recent breakthroughs in using peptides as agonists or antagonists for various hormones and antibodies have spurred a growing need for an advanced downstream processing system for peptide drugs. This development aims to replace the costly multistep chromatography-based platform. This ambition is motivated by the attention that in peptide manufacturing, separation and purification processes remain a challenge from the aspect of product purity and process yield and represent time and cost-intense downstream operations. The manufacturing strategies to improve processability, reduce hygroscopicity, increase stability, and lower purification cost provide the opportunity to expedite bringing peptide drugs to the market. However, pharmaceutical companies have been facing considerable challenges in overcoming the manufacturing hurdles related to the peptide crystallisation process. The overall objectives of ASPIRATION have been to 1) control the peptide co-crystallisation in the presence of soft templates, 2) gain a more in-depth understanding of soft template-mediated peptide crystallisation by exploring different soft templates using experiments and molecular modelling, and 3) continuously produce peptide crystals with improved physicochemical properties such as physical and chemical stability, and solubility. A parallel goal of this action is to foster the development of the researcher i.e., myself, and help to achieve my future goals to be an independent researcher.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Peptides are recognised for being highly selective and efficacious signalling molecules that bind to the specific cell surface receptors or ion channel where they trigger intracellular effects. They are relatively safe compared to small molecule-based drugs and are well tolerated in the human body. Peptide therapeutics exhibits an excellent opportunity in the pharmaceutical industry as their target specificity is much better than small molecules drugs, while the production cost and complexity are lower than protein-based biopharmaceuticals. In the past decade, peptide therapeutics have gained a wide range of applications in medicine and biotechnology. Currently, there are more than 60 US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved peptides medicine on the market and this is expected to grow significantly with 140 peptide drugs in the clinical trials and more than 500 peptide drugs in pre-clinical phase. Despite several advantages of peptide drugs, poor physical and chemical stability, and a short circulating plasma half-life are major issues related to the peptide drugs. Furthermore, these issues could be easily resolved by determining and studying the crystal forms of the peptides. Crystalline peptide not only improves the physical and chemical stability of the peptides but also improves processability and reduces the production cost. This action aims to introduce a peptide crystallisation method based on a soft template strategy where peptide building blocks i.e. amino acids or other short peptides will act as templates for the crystallisation of peptide drugs. This will be a low cost and scalable approach for crystallising peptides and gaining insight into the structural determination of peptides. Also, an in-depth understanding of the thermodynamic and kinetic processes that drive the crystallization for a specific peptide is required before the critical process parameters can be altered to achieve control over nucleation and crystal growth.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE · LondonCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union