Les médicaments peptidiques : mythe ou réalité ?

Abstract

Peptides as drugs: myth or reality? Peptides find many applications in the fields of biotechnology, among which pharmaceutical applications. Progression of the number of traditional drugs deposited at the FDA is slowing down. It’s the reason why many big pharmaceutical companies invest more and more in peptides to open new therapeutic perspectives. Even if some peptides have been used as therapeutic agents in their natural bioactive form for nearly one century, a significant development of the number of peptides has occurred since a few tenths of years, in particular due to the development of methods of production, chemical as solid phase as well as biological as phage display. Peptides have a number of advantages when compared to traditional drugs like small molecules, however their development encounters some limitations, which are relative to a low ability to cross membrane barriers and a low half-life time and a difficulty to understand their mechanism of action. A series of solutions can be brought to overcome these problems. Molecular modelling has an important role to play in this context, notably for the in silico determination of the structure, the stability and the polymorphism of peptides or for the study and the improvement of the capacity to bind a target

Keywords

• design
• drugs
• in silico
• in silico
• Peptide
• Peptide
• structure
• structure