Monday, July 16, 2012
Current peptide stabilization
technologies use chemical linkers to keep peptides in their natural state, but
in some cases these can cause autoimmune reactions. PeptiVir Inc. aims
to avoid such effects by placing hydrophobic amino acids in specific locations
within the core of its synthetic peptides to stabilize the compounds.
In the body, peptides are
connected to other proteins that act as a stabilizing scaffold to maintain the
peptide in a biologically active alpha helix conformation. The alpha helix
regions allow the peptides to interact with other domains within the protein or
with proteins involved in another complex.