SBIR Phase I: Cost-Effective Peptide Production Platform

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的广泛影响是加速被称为肽的特殊分子的使用。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，其应用范围从抗菌剂、疫苗、组织工程和药物输送的支架、细胞培养基的生长因子，以及医学营养或慢性疾病控制的生物活性肽。然而，尽管它们具有巨大的潜力，但由于肽合成的成本过高，很少有人能够大规模地进行翻译。本项目提出了一种多肽生产系统。拟议的项目旨在开发一种重组技术平台，该平台将大大降低制造多肽的成本，超过目前商业上可行的成本。它解决了肽生产从不同的角度比目前的重组肽生产技术。具体来说，利用肽可以作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肽的生产和纯化成为可能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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.