Applications of Synthetic Peptides

The tremendous advances in the development of methods for the design and synthesis of peptides. pseudo-peptides and related compounds, as well as the corresponding advances in our understanding of peptide and protein structure, conformation, topography, and dynamics provides unique opportunities to apply designed synthetic peptides for an enormous variety of problems in chemistry, biology, and medicine. In addition, if these advances can be coupled to the advances in molecular biology and the human genome project, on the one hand, and asymmetric synthesis and catalysis, on the other, it should be possible to provide hitherto unavailable, indeed unthinkable, approaches to diverse areas of drug design, behavioral neuroscience, molecular immunology, chemotherapy, and a wide variety of other uses. Already it is clear that peptide therapy has enormous potential in such diverse areas as growth control, blood pressure management, neurotransmission, hormone action, satiety, addiction, pain, digestion, reproduction, and so forth. Nature has “discovered” that it can control nearly all biological processes by various kinds of molecular recognition, and that peptides and proteins are uniquely suited for this control because of their enormous potential for diversity and their unique physico-chemical properties. This finding may, perhaps, be most readily understood if one recognizes that, considering only the 20 normal eukaryotic amino acids, the number of unique chemical entities for a pentapeptide is 3,200,000 (205), for a hexapeptide it is 64,000,000 (206), and so on. Considered from this perspective, perhaps it is not unexpected that Nature has “discovered” that peptides and proteins can do it all, from providing structure and motion, to catalysis, to information transduction, to growth and maturation, and so on. The ability of the immune system in higher animals, including humans, to recognize literally millions of foreign materials made by Nature as well as humans, and to get rid of them as part of its survival strategy, is just one example that illustrates the potential of peptide-based drugs, therapeutics, and modulators of biological function. Despite the enormous potential of peptides and small proteins for these areas, surprisingly little advantage has been taken of the potential of these molecules as drugs and tools for use in basic and clinical research.