Because a peptide is a small piece of a protein with less than about 50 amino acid residues, peptides as drugs have several advantages over proteins currently being evaluated in clinical research programs.  Smaller non-peptidic mimetics of peptide drug leads may provide additional advantages. The Company’s motivation to pursue peptide-based drug design is multi-fold and includes the following:

• A given protein often exhibits multiple bioactivities (some undesirable), one of which may be selected for in a derived or designed peptide or its mimetic.
• Peptides are potentially useful as therapeutics for essentially all areas of disease treatment.
• Peptide drugs often exhibit improved safety profiles and rarely trigger host immune response-induced resistance experienced with proteins.
• Purified peptides usually have very long shelf lives in solution or as dry powder.
• Peptides are useful intermediaries for identifying the pharmacophore requirements (e.g., shape, electrical charge distribution) of molecules that interact with drug targets like enzymes and receptors that control cell functions.
• By altering their amino acid sequence, peptides are readily permutated into large libraries that lend themselves to rapid combinatorial analysis for the selection of additional bioactive molecules.
• Manufacture of peptides by chemical synthesis can be substantially less expensive than producing recombinant proteins via fermentation.