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New technology offers fast Peptide synthesis
Automated manufacturing could make it easier to develop and test new Peptide synthesis drugs.

Manufacturing small proteins known as peptides is usually very time-consuming, which has slowed development of new Peptide synthesis drugs for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infections.

To help speed up the manufacturing process, MIT researchers have designed a machine that can rapidly produce large quantities of customized peptides. Their new tabletop machine can form links between amino acids, the buildings blocks of proteins, in about 37 seconds, and it takes less than an hour to generate complete Peptide synthesis molecules containing up to 60 amino acids.

“You can dial in whatever amino acids you want, and the machine starts printing off these peptides faster than any machine in the world,” says Bradley Pentelute, the Pfizer-Laubach Career Development Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

This technology could help researchers rapidly generate new peptide drugs to test on a variety of diseases, and it also raises the possibility of easily producing customized cancer vaccines for individual patients.

Pentelute is the senior author of a paper describing the new system in the Feb. 27 issue of Nature Chemical Biology. The paper’s lead authors are graduate students Alexander Mijalis and Dale Thomas; other authors are graduate student Mark Simon, research associate Andrea Adamo, Ryan Beaumont, and Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical Engineering Klavs Jensen.