New Technology Offers fast Peptide synthesis

The world is progressing and it is progressing rapid and fast. To speed up the process of peptide synthesis MIT researchers have designed a new machine that can rapidly produce large quantities of custom peptides.

Producing small proteins known as peptides is usually a very time-consuming process, which has sluggish the development of new peptide drugs for diseases like cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infection.

The new tabletop machine designed by MIT researchers can form links between amino acids (building block of proteins) in about just 37 seconds, and it takes less than an hour to produce complete peptide molecules containing nearly 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, therefore, could help researchers quickly generate new peptide drugs to test on various diseases, and it also raises the possibility of easily producing customized cancer vaccines for individual patients.

It uses traditional peptide manufacturing techniques, which were developed more than 2 decades ago. The new machine takes about an hour to perform the chemical reactions needed to add each amino acid to a peptide chain.

Pentelute, Jensen, and their colleagues set out several years ago to devise a faster method based on a newer manufacturing approach known as flow chemistry. Under this strategy, chemicals flow through a series of modules that each performs one step of the overall synthesis.

In an earlier version of the machine, the person running the process needed to manually pump amino acids out of their storage bottles. However, the new machine makes it automatic which is a sincere effort to cut down the time in Custom peptide synthesis.

 “Our focus when we were setting out to design the automated machine was to have all the steps controlled by the computer, and that would eliminate a lot of the human error and unreliability that’s associated with someone doing this process by hand,” Mijalis says.

Once a user enters the desired amino acid sequence, the amino acids are pumped, in the correct order, into a module where they are briefly heated to about 90 degrees Celsius to make them more chemically reactive. After being activated, the amino acids flow into a chamber where they are added to the growing peptide chains.

“It’s a very iterative process, where you’re building up this molecular chain, one piece by one piece,” Mijalis says.

As each amino acid is added to the chain, the researchers can measure how much was correctly incorporated by analyzing the waste products that flow into the final chamber of the device. The current machine attaches each amino acid to the chain with about 99 percent efficiency.

“In my view, this approach opens up the field to the generation of peptide libraries that enable more complete structure-activity relationships of bioactive peptides in a matter of days, as well as extending this chemical approach to the synthesis of small proteins and protein domains,” says Paul Alewood, a research group leader in chemistry and structural biology at the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience.

“It will be used in both academia and industry when commercially available instruments for this chemistry become widely available,” says Alewood, who was not involved in the research.

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