SBIR Phase I: Cost-Effective Peptide Production Platform

小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是加速使用称为肽的特殊分子。在过去的二十年里，人们对生物活性肽和结构肽进行了广泛的学术研究，其应用范围包括抗菌剂、疫苗、组织工程和药物递送支架、细胞培养基的生长因子以及用于医学营养或控制慢性疾病的生物活性物质。然而，尽管它们具有巨大的潜力，但很少有大规模翻译，部分原因是肽合成的成本过高。 本项目旨在开发一种重组技术平台，该平台将大大降低目前商业上可行的肽生产成本。它从与当前重组肽生产技术不同的角度解决肽生产。具体而言，利用多肽可以被视为聚合物而不是具有复杂结构的折叠蛋白质这一事实，新型微生物细胞工厂将使多肽的生产和纯化成为可能。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to accelerate the use of special molecules known as peptides. The last twenty years have seen extensive academic research on bioactive and structural peptides for applications ranging from antimicrobials, vaccines, scaffolds for tissue engineering and drug delivery, growth factors for cell culture media, and bioactives for medical nutrition or the control of chronic diseases. However, despite their great potential, few have advanced to translation at scale, due in part to the prohibitive cost of peptide synthesis. This project advances a peptide production system.The proposed project aims to develop a recombinant technology platform that will dramatically decrease the cost of manufacturing of peptides beyond what is currently commercially feasible. It addresses peptide production from a different perspective than that of current recombinant peptide production technologies. Specifically, taking advantage of the fact that peptides can be treated as polymers rather than as folded proteins with a complex structure, novel microbial cell factories will enable the peptide production and purification.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.