PeptAIDes

Today’s drug research community is showing increasing interest in bioactive peptides as a potential starting point for the development of innovative therapies. Peptide entities promise very high affinity to their target receptor and are more selective than small molecule drugs. Moreover, peptide therapeutics are less toxic due to their rapid clearance. Unfortunately, many promising peptide drug candidates never make it to the clinics because of the translational challenges of transforming a lead into a clinical candidate. Because it is not realistic for a single laboratory or scientist to perform multidisciplinary peptide drug research alone, only closely-connected interdisciplinary teams successfully work in preclinical peptide research.

In our project, we postulate ‘PeptAIDes’ (Peptides for the treatment of Autoimmune and Inflammatory Diseases), a highly collaborative research platform including the entire spectrum of disciplines in drug development, which will transform therapeutic leads into clinical candidates. PeptAIDes will combine four pillars in one collaborative approach: i) molecular studies of the peptide-receptor interaction, ii) peptide chemistry to implement specialized peptide synthesis strategies for optimization of the candidate properties, iii) pharmacological evaluation to enable the development of drug-like features; and iv) validation of candidates in relevant models of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.