(132d) Reducing the Synthetic Peptide Waste-Line

Peptide drugs are an important class of therapeutics worldwide and at present there are approximately 100 approved peptide drugs. With a renewed and growing interest in therapeutic peptides across the pharmaceutical industry, pressure is increasing on drug developers to take more seriously the sustainability ramifications of this fast-growing modality. A majority of therapeutic peptides are manufactured synthetically, range in sequence length up to 60 amino acids, and many are progressing towards high manufacturing volume. The ACS pharmaceutical Roundtable recently reported the first environmental benchmarking study where Process Mass Intensity (PMI) was reported for therapeutic peptides and found to be orders of magnitude higher than small molecule therapeutics. The results of this study are presently guiding new research and development strategies for sustainable peptide syntheses.