Publications related to De novo development of proteolytically resistant therapeutic peptides for oral administration

Development of tools and methods for protein identification: From single molecules to in vivo applications

As the fundamental machinery orchestrating cellular functions, proteins influence the state of every cell profoundly. As cells exhibit significant variations from one to another, analyzing the proteome on a single-cell level is imperative to unravel their ...

EPFL2024

Methods for high-throughput synthesis and screening of peptide libraries

Zsolt Bognár

Macrocycles provide an attractive modality for drug development but the identification of ligands to targets of interest is hindered by the lack of large macrocyclic compound libraries for high-throughput screening. A strategy to efficiently synthesize lar ...

EPFL2024

Solid-phase peptide synthesis in 384-well plates

Christian Heinis, Gontran Sangouard, Mischa Schüttel, Sevan Mleh Habeshian, Edward Jeffrey Will, Alexander Lund Nielsen, Anne Sofie Luise Zarda

Newer solid-phase peptide synthesis and release strategies enable the production of short peptides with high purity, allowing direct screening for desired bioactivity without prior chromatographic purification. However, the maximum number of peptides that ...

2024

Synthesis and application of bifunctional hypervalent iodine reagents for peptide modification

Elija Grinhagena

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are responsible for regulating many biological processes in human bodies. PPIs often have a large binding site and often interact through an alpha helical segment. Therefore, the inhibition of PPIs can be difficult using ...

EPFL2023

High-affinity peptides developed against calprotectin and their application as synthetic ligands in diagnostic assays

Christian Heinis, Florence Pojer, Lluc Farrera Soler, Kelvin Ka Ching Lau, Cristina Diaz Perlas

A peptide was developed that binds to calprotectin, a marker of major inflammatory disorders, and found to be suited for diagnostic tests. The use of synthetic peptides in assays is of great interest due to their high precision, robustness and low price. ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Development of cyclic peptides that can be administered orally to inhibit disease targets

Christian Heinis, Manuel Leonardo Merz

Cyclic peptides can bind challenging disease targets, but their oral application is hindered by digestion and absorption issues. We developed a versatile method for the synthesis and functional screening of vast numbers of synthetic cyclic peptides and ide ...

2023

Development of methods for the synthesis of large combinatorial libraries of macrocyclic compounds

Mischa Schüttel

Macrocycles have raised much interest in the pharmaceutical industry due to their ability to bind challenging targets while often still being able to cross membranes to reach intracellular proteins. However, the development of macrocyclic ligands to new di ...

EPFL2023

Single-Molecule Peptide Identification Using Fluorescence Blinking Fingerprints

Pablo Rivera Fuentes, Salome Riccarda Püntener

The ability to identify peptides with single-molecule sensitivity would lead to next-generation proteomics methods for basic research and clinical applications. Existing single-molecule peptide sequencing methods can read some amino acid sequences, but the ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Peptide-Hypervalent Iodine Reagent Chimeras: Enabling Peptide Functionalization and Macrocyclization

Christian Heinis, Jérôme Waser, Xinjian Ji, Xingyu Liu

Herein, we report a novel strategy for the modification of peptides based on the introduction of highly reactive hypervalent iodine reagents-ethynylbenziodoxolones (EBXs)-onto peptides. These peptide-EBXs can be readily accessed, by both solution- and soli ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH2023

Highly Efficient Cardiac Differentiation and Maintenance by Thrombin-Coagulated Fibrin Hydrogels Enriched with Decellularized Porcine Heart Extracellular Matrix

Philippe Renaud, Thomas Michael Braschler, Fatemeh Navaee

Biochemical and biophysical properties instruct cardiac tissue morphogenesis. Here, we are reporting on a blend of cardiac decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) from porcine ventricular tissue and fibrinogen that is suitable for investigations employi ...

MDPI2023

Overexpression of human alpha-Synuclein leads to dysregulated microbiome/metabolites with ageing in a rat model of Parkinson disease

Yogesh Singh Chauhan, Hilal Lashuel, Florian Lang, Joan Romani Aumedes, Yogesh Singh

Background Braak's hypothesis states that sporadic Parkinson's disease (PD) follows a specific progression of pathology from the peripheral to the central nervous system, and this progression can be monitored by detecting the accumulation of alpha-Synuclei ...

BMC2023

Hypervalent Iodine: New Reagents and Functionalization of Peptides

Eliott Hugo Joran Le Du

Alkynes are found in a multitude of natural or synthetic bioactive compounds. In addition to the capacity of these chemical motifs to impact the physicochemical properties of a molecule of interest, the well-established reactivity of alkynes makes them ide ...

EPFL2023

De novo developed small cyclic peptides that are orally available

Manuel Leonardo Merz

Cyclic peptides are ring-shaped molecules that emerged as a promising class of therapeutics. While it is often difficult to find small molecule binders for challenging disease targets, cyclic peptides can bind to featureless surfaces or inhibit protein-pro ...

EPFL2022

Cyclative Release Strategy to Obtain Pure Cyclic Peptides Directly from the Solid Phase

Christian Heinis, Manuel Leonardo Merz, Sevan Mleh Habeshian, Ganesh Ashokrao Sable

The synthesis of large numbers of cyclic peptides-required, for example, in screens for drug development-is currently limited by the need of chromatographic purification of individual peptides. Herein, we have developed a strategy in which cyclic peptides ...

2022

Solid-phase peptide synthesis on disulfide-linker resin followed by reductive release affords pure thiol-functionalized peptides

Christian Heinis, Ganesh Kumar Mothukuri, Manuel Leonardo Merz, Zsolt Bognár, Peter Matei Frisius Pânzar, Alexander Lund Nielsen

Thiol groups are suitable handles for site-selectively modifying, immobilizing or cyclizing individual peptides or entire peptide libraries. A limiting step in producing the thiol-functionalized peptides is the chromatographic purification, which is partic ...

2022

Investigation of Carboxylic Acid Isosteres and Prodrugs for Inhibition of the Human SIRT5 Lysine Deacylase Enzyme

Alexander Lund Nielsen

Sirtuin 5 (SIRT5) is a protein lysine deacylase enzyme that regulates diverse biology by hydrolyzing epsilon-N-carboxyacyllysine posttranslational modifications in the cell. Inhibition of SIRT5 has been linked to potential treatment of several cancers but ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH2022

Azide-Containing Hypervalent Iodine Reagents for Biomolecules Functionalization

Raphaël Michel Henri Simonet-Davin

The goal of my PhD was the development of a new method for unselective surface labeling, not substrate-specific, that would give access to direct visualization of any surface interactions. In order to achieve this challenging goal, we wanted to develop a g ...

EPFL2022

Protein Engineering for Personalized therapy and diagnosis

Lixia Wei

Protein Engineering, especially protein post-translational modification (PTM), ex-tends proteomes in a more complex way than one can expect from analysis of their encod-ing genomes. It can activate or deactivate certain catalytic functions, add new desired ...

EPFL2022

Towards the Development of Orally Available Peptide Therapeutics

Christian Heinis, Xudong Kong

Peptides have a number of attractive properties that make them an interesting modality for drug development, including their ability to bind challenging targets, their high target specificity, and their non-toxic metabolic products. However, a major limita ...

2021

Methods for the generation of large combinatorial macrocycle libraries

Sevan Mleh Habeshian

Macrocycles are an attractive class of molecules due to their good binding properties and yet rather small size that allows, in many cases, crossing membranes to reach intracellular targets. In comparison to classical small molecule drugs, macrocycles are ...

EPFL2021