BPS 2025
Liquid-phase peptide fragment manufacturing technologies and workflows using batch and flow chemistry
Eric Fang
Site Head-CSO, Snapdragon Chemistry, a Cambrex Company
ABSTRACT
Peptide-based therapeutics are an area of increasing interest within the pharmaceutical industry with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of ~5.5% over the next 10 years. Recently there has been significant increased interest in these therapies due to the success of GLP-1 receptor agonists for the treatment of diabetes and for weight loss. Currently Solid-Phase Peptide Synthesis (SPPS) is one of the leading manufacturing technology in use for the production of peptides. SPPS, however, suffers from several disadvantages including large amounts of solvent waste and the requirement of more specialized equipment resulting in manufacturing capacity limitations. Liquid phase peptide synthesis (LPPS) offers an attractive alternative approach with dramatic reductions in PMI and the ability to use traditional batch reactors. Snapdragon has developed two distinct LPPS processes for the production of peptide fragments in standard batch reactor and flow chemistry to support downstream solution-phase fragment coupling. These processes have now been demonstrated on multi-kilogram scale and provide an order of magnitude reduction in PMI compared to typical SPPS processes. This presentation will further describe ongoing developments for the LPPS process development workflow to make these approaches more accessible at an early stage of clinical development.
BIO
As Chief Scientific Officer and Site Head, Eric oversees all projects and guides solution delivery by building a deep understanding of all projects through kinetic and thermodynamic analyses. Eric completed his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Toronto under the direction of Professor Mark Lautens. Subsequently, Eric worked with Professor Eric Jacobsen as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University where he focused on asymmetric catalysis and natural product synthesis. He began his industrial career at Amgen in Small Molecule Process and Product Development. He quickly rose in levels of responsibility while developing elegant synthetic routes and brought new process technologies to many complex molecules in Amgen’s pipeline. Eric is passionate about the tremendous power and opportunity Snapdragon’s core technology brings to the development and application of continuous synthetic routes to complex molecules.