BRUCE H. MORIMOTO
Allon Therapeutics Inc. 1168 Hamilton Street, Suite 506 Vancouver, British Columbia, V6B 2S2 Canada

My former mentor once told me, “For drug development projects, you can only have two of the three: time, cost or quality”, meaning that you can shorten time and keep quality high, but it will cost you more. Or you can lower cost and shorten time, but quality will suffer.
When it comes to peptide therapeutics, can we have it all?
Although peptides in general are selective and potent, they are rapidly degraded as the result of chemical and/or biological instability, and they suffer from a limited number of options for delivery, most often parenteral injections of some type. Can we therefore make peptides more stable, deliver them conveniently, AND retain potency-selectivity?
At the recent AsiaTIDES conference in Tokyo, Japan, it appears that progress is being made in all of these critical areas.
A series of talks by academic labs and both large and small pharmaceutical companies attacked obesity and diabetes problems by engineering “better” peptide hormones. The regulation of food intake, hunger, and satiety is controlled by a complex interaction of peptide hormones. Gherlin, GLP-1, and PYY are but a few of the players that have sparked inte ...