Making Peptides at Large Scale

CUSTOM PEPTIDE manufacturers speak fondly of Fuzeon, a 36-amino acid HIV fusion inhibitor that has been on the market since 2003. It’s not because the drug, developed by Trimeris and Roche, is a blockbuster. In fact, many call it a flop because runaway sales of the high-priced treatment never materialized. They like it because, to be effective, the daily dose of the poorly stable peptide is a hefty 180 mg. That dose makes Fuzeon one of a few peptide drugs to have been made in near-ton annual quantities. And beyond sheer volume, they like that it proved large-scale production of a long peptide is possible. Fuzeon production broke ground in terms of equipment and process design. To couple that many amino acids takes a huge number of synthetic steps and massive amounts of raw materials. “All the amino acid suppliers had to gear up to supply that manufacturing effort, which brought the costs down for ...