Prospects for Polypeptide Drugs

The 21st century is the century of the biotechnology industry, and the active polypeptide industry has a bright future. Over the past decade, due to the increasing difficulty in developing new drugs with entirely new chemical structures and the rising costs, scientists have gradually turned their attention to the development of active polypeptide drugs. What are polypeptide drugs? According to the international pharmaceutical classification, drugs with more than 100 Amino Acid molecules are classified as proteins (including well-known ones like insulin, growth hormone, interferon, etc.), while those with fewer than 100 amino acid molecules are classified as polypeptides. As biologically active substances involved in various cellular functions within the body, polypeptides are involved in hormones, nerves, cell growth, and reproduction. Compared to small molecule chemical drugs, polypeptide drugs are often safer, have fewer side effects, and rarely cause severe immune reactions.

Market research firm Monita introduced in its research report that before the 1980s, the development of polypeptide drugs was relatively slow. However, with the progress in chemistry and life sciences, the research and market launch of polypeptide drugs have accelerated in recent years. Polypeptide drugs are mainly used to treat cancer, metabolic diseases, cardiovascular diseases, infectious diseases, endocrine diseases, blood diseases, and pain relief, among other areas.

Currently, the polypeptide drugs on the market are mainly produced through three methods: extraction from animal tissues, chemical synthesis, and gene recombination expression. It is understood that due to the reduction in raw material costs, economies of scale, and advances in separation technology, the cost of chemical polypeptide synthesis, especially solid-phase polypeptide synthesis, has significantly decreased. The market sales scale of chemically synthesized polypeptide drugs in China has been expanding year by year, and the market share of chemically synthesized polypeptide drugs in China’s polypeptide drug market has also been increasing annually.

As chemically synthesized polypeptide drugs grow rapidly, gene recombination expression for preparing polypeptide drugs has also attracted industry attention. Compared to chemical synthesis, gene recombination is more suitable for the preparation of long peptides. Moreover, with technological advancements, the cost of producing polypeptide drugs through gene recombination is also continuously decreasing.

Overall, polypeptide drugs extracted from animal tissues will gradually be phased out, and chemical synthesis and gene recombination methods will complement each other as the main production methods for polypeptide drugs for a long time. Currently, the application of polypeptides is not only concentrated in polypeptide drugs, polypeptide drug carriers, and tissue engineering materials but also includes polypeptide nutritional foods and beauty products.