Rapid robotic synthesis of valuable peptides and protein structures that can’t be manufactured with cells.
Amide Technologies is empowering scientists on the cutting edge of peptide drug design by offering on-demand complex peptide manufacturing at unprecedented speed.
Imagine your body is a massive construction site, constantly growing and evolving. Proteins are the construction workers who operate the heavy machinery and physically build your body. Peptides - composed of the same amino acid building blocks as the proteins - are like the hands of the workers. They snap things into place, send messages, and keep the job site running smoothly.
These peptides are becoming increasingly important in the discovery of new drugs. FDA approvals of peptide-based therapeutic drugs have increased significantly in recent years. Popular peptide-based drugs include Type II diabetes medications Mounjaro, Ozempic, Trulicity and Victoza, as well as osteoporosis drug Forteo and cancer treatments Lupron and Zoladex.
But, sourcing these peptides through traditional Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis (SPPS) and natural biological expression is a bottleneck to therapeutic progress and severely limits the types of amino acid chains drug designers can explore. Amide has developed a robotic peptide printer and manufacturing software platform that expands what is possible in peptide drug design by offering reliable linear synthesis of peptides up to 120 amino acids, dramatically improving upon SPPS technology’s maximum of around 40 amino acids. Amide's Automated Fast Flow Peptide Synthesis (AFPS) method uses heat and flow to enable fast, reliable synthesis of complex peptides that can’t be naturally expressed, such as mirror image proteins, branched structures and peptides with many non-natural amino acids.
The company can ship urgent orders within a week, empowering rapid design-build-test cycles for labs who typically wait weeks to months to test one hypothesis. For the first time, customers have routine access to highly hydrophobic peptides, cyclic constructs, branched peptides, and mirror image proteins. Novel structures enable novel modalities, which means more effective clinical programs supported by Amide's synthesis capabilities.
“Amide delivers on complex peptide orders that other vendors refuse because peptide sourcing shouldn’t stand in the way of discovery,” said Amide CEO Mark Simon, PhD. “Amide provides unprecedented access to large and unusual compounds to eliminate pain points for discovery chemistry teams and enable better, faster science.”
Amide’s technology was initially developed by Brad Pentelute and Mark Simon, while Brad was a new Professor of Chemistry at MIT, and Mark was a graduate student in his first cohort. While there had been significant research in the field of solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) prior to Brad and Mark’s work, it had proven challenging to develop an automated tool capable of rapid peptide synthesis. After Brad had demonstrated his initial breakthrough in SPPS, Jeremy Wertheimer, who previously founded ITA software and served as VP of Engineering at Google, teamed up with Brad to form Amide.