Thank you for attending the Boulder Peptide Symposium last November. We are pleased to announce that videos of the presentations from the Symposium are now available to attendees on our website. If you did not attend the meeting, you may purchase access by visiting the video subscription page. A gallery of photos from the event is also available on the website. We look forward to seeing you at BPS 2023 in Napa, September 18 -21, 2023.
The Virtual BPF Seminars are back! The next one will be held February 15th starting at 1:30 PM EST. It will feature Yvonne Ware, Associate Director of Manufacturing Operations at BioNTech SE, and Cary Potochnik, NAPP Team Lead at PolyPeptide Group, speaking on Individualized Peptides: From Manufacturing to Patient Bedside. Each speaker will present for 30 minutes followed by a moderated panel discussion when attendees will have a chance to submit and ask questions.
Registration is free, and can be completed at Virtual BPS | Boulder Peptide Symposium. *Note* you must be signed in to the site inorder to sign up.
These educational e-seminars are provided free of charge by the Boulder Peptide Foundation. If your company is interested in supporting this or other educational initiatives, please email sponsorship@boulderpeptide.org.
Missed seeing any of the VBPS events this year? Good news, the videos are available!
Recordings of the seminars are available at www.boulderpeptide.org/virtual-bps/. *Please note - you must be logged in to the Boulder Peptide website to access the links*
These educational e-seminars are provided free of charge by the Boulder Peptide Foundation. If your company is interested in supporting this or other educational initiatives, please email sponsorship@boulderpeptide.org.
Missed seeing the August VBPS event on the Design of PCSK9 Inhibitor Peptides? Have no fear, the videos are here!
On August 2nd, Chengwei Wu and Li Li, both from Merck Research Laboratories, each gave a talk on how helped to develop an orally bioavailable, tricyclic peptide PCSK9 inhibitor. Each speaker presented for 30 minutes followed by a moderated panel discussion and Q&A session.
Recordings of the seminar are available at www.boulderpeptide.org/virtual-bps/. *Please note - you must be logged in to the Boulder Peptide website to access the link*
These educational e-seminars are provided free of charge by the Boulder Peptide Foundation. If your company is interested in supporting this or other educational initiatives, please email sponsorship@boulderpeptide.org.
The September BPF Virtual Symposium will feature John Mumm, founder and CEO of Deka Biosciences, and Gaurav Bhardwaj, Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Washington and the Institute for Protein Design, speaking on how they are using peptides to target interleukin receptors. Each speaker will present for 30 minutes followed by a moderated panel discussion when attendees will have a chance to submit and ask questions.
Registration is free, and can be completed at Virtual BPS | Boulder Peptide Symposium. *Note* you must be signed in to the site inorder to sign up.
These educational e-seminars are provided free of charge by the Boulder Peptide Foundation. If your company is interested in supporting this or other educational initiatives, please email sponsorship@boulderpeptide.org.
The August BPF Virtual Symposium will feature Chengwei Wu and Li Li, both from Merck Research Laboratories espeaking on different aspects of the development of PCSK9 inhibitor peptides. Each speaker will present for 30 minutes followed by a moderated panel discussion when attendees will have a chance to submit and ask questions.
Registration is free, and can be completed at Virtual BPS | Boulder Peptide Symposium. *Note* you must be signed in to the site inorder to sign up.
These educational e-seminars are provided free of charge by the Boulder Peptide Foundation. If your company is interested in supporting this or other educational initiatives, please email sponsorship@boulderpeptide.org.
The Meienhofer Award was established in 2007 to recognize an individual with a lifetime of achievement in peptide science. The biennial award is named after Johannes Meienhofer, in honor of his transformative discoveries in solid phase peptide synthesis. Notably, Meienhofer's work demonstrated the power of medicinal chemistry in peptide pharmacology and is considered to have laid the foundation of modern synthetic peptide therapeutics.
Stephen B. H. Kent, recipient of the 2022 Meienhofer Award, received his first two university degrees in his native New Zealand and his Ph.D. (Organic Chemistry) from University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral work with Bruce Merrifield, Professor Kent held faculty appointments at the Rockefeller University, the California Institute of Technology, and The Scripps Research Institute. He was Founder of Gryphon Sciences and served as its Chief Scientific Officer from 1997-2000. In 2001, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where since June 2021 he is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Over the past several decades, Stephen Kent has profoundly shaped the field of peptide and protein chemistry. His many and diverse contributions have altered the way scientists tackle the study of these macromolecules. He pioneered the total chemical synthesis of protein molecules and showed it to be a practical and versatile method for the production of large quantities of high purity material for detailed mechanistic and structural investigations. In particular, the Kent chemical ligation concept together with the native chemical ligation reaction made proteins and enzymes accessible to direct chemical investigation via convergent, chemoselective assembly of unprotected synthetic peptide segments.
Since its introduction in 1994, native chemical ligation has become robust, reliable, and widely used. Efficient total chemical synthesis of a wide range of protein molecules, including the enzymes HIV-1 protease and human lysozyme, the protein hormone human insulin, glycoprotein mimetics of erythropoietin, together with numerous mirror image protein molecules for his pioneering studies of racemic protein crystallography, highlight the practical utility of such approaches. As these examples attest, Stephen Kent has had a gift, throughout his career, for developing new chemistries and for utilizing them to reveal the molecular basis of protein function.
His exceptional achievements in scientific research have previously been recognized by the receipt of major distinctions, including the ACS Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry (1994), the Protein Society E.T. Kaiser Award (2002), the Vincent du Vigneaud (2004) and R. Bruce Merrifield (2009) Awards of the American Peptide Society, the European Peptide Society Rudinger Medal (2010), the Japanese Peptide Society Akabori Medal (2010), the ACS Alfred Bader Award in Bioorganic Chemistry (2011), the Lorne Symposium Leach Medal (2013), the ETH Prelog Medal (2017), and the inaugural Scoffone Award of the Italian Peptide Society (2018).
Dr. Kent will receive his award Tuesday, November 8th during the Boulder Peptide Symposium. Register today!
More information on the Meienhofer Award, including a list of previous recipients, and the Boulder Peptide Symposium can be found online at www.boulderpeptide.org/meienhofer-award.
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We are looking forward to our upcoming peptide symposium in Boulder and having an opportunity to greet many of you in person. In order to enhance the safety of all our visitors the organizers have finalized a COVID policy for all guests.
As part of this policy, proof of COVID-19 vaccination is required to attend the symposium in person. This information will be required at time of check in and can be in the form of a government issued vaccination card, mobile app, or image of paper documentation. Individuals who are not vaccinated, even for religious or medical reasons, will not be allowed to attend the symposium.
The Meienhofer Award was established in 2007 to annually recognize an individual with a lifetime of achievement in peptide science. The award is named after Johannes Meienhofer, in honor of his transformative discoveries in solid phase peptide synthesis. Notably, Meienhofer's work demonstrated the power of medicinal chemistry in peptide pharmacology and is considered to have laid the foundation of modern synthetic peptide therapeutics.
This year's recipient is Dr. Sam Gellman, the Ralph F. Hirschmann Professor of Chemistry and Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He earned his A.B. from Harvard University in 1981 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University, under Ronald Breslow, in 1986. After an NIH post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, with Peter Dervan, Gellman joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1987. Major interests in Gellman's program involve polypeptides in diverse forms and settings. Specific topics include fundamental studies of non-covalent interactions, elucidation of the origins of peptide and protein folding preferences, development and application of unnatural peptidic oligomers that display protein-like conformational behavior ("foldamers"), creation of new amphiphiles for membrane protein manipulation, and development of biologically active polymers. The work from Gellman’s laboratory has been recognized by the Vincent du Vigneaud Award and Rao Makineni Lectureship from the American Peptide Society, and by the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry and the Ronald Breslow Award in Biomimetic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. Gellman is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Science.
Dr. Gellman will receive his award Tuesday, Sept. 24 during the Boulder Peptide Symposium. Register today!
More information on the Meienhofer Award, including a list of previous recipients, and the Boulder Peptide Symposium can be found online at www.boulderpeptide.org/meienhofer-award.
August 6, 2018 (Boulder, CO) - 
The Boulder Peptide Society is pleased to announce that Dr. Jevgenij Raskatov, of the University of California Santa Cruz, has received the 2018 Young Investigator Award. The Young Investigator Award was established to support promising peptide scientists during the pre-tenure period.
Jevgenij Raskatov is the Assistant Professor in Department of Chemistry at the University of California Santa Cruz. Dr. Raskatov received his B.Sci. in Chemistry from the University of Heidelberg in 2006 and D.Phil in Physical Organic Chemistry from Oxford University in 2009, under the supervision of J. M. Brown. From 2009 to 2014, he was a postdoctoral researcher at California Institute of Technology working under the supervision of Peter Dervan at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.
Jevgenij Raskatov is applying his strong skills in physical organic chemistry and chemical biology to Alzheimer's disease. He has assembled an interdisciplinary research team to investigate Alzheimer's amyloid beta and its interactions with steroid hormones through a wide array of chemical and biological techniques. Upon arriving at UCSC, his team discovered a minute variation within the amyloid beta framework, the substitution of glutamate 22 through aspartate, which delays aggregation of amyloid beta by about tenfold. Remarkably, the two polypeptides differ by one methylene group and are identical in both length and charge. Dr. Raskatov has put forward the innovative hypothesis that the Glu22Asp alteration may have protective features in Alzheimer's disease. He has expanded upon this discovery to build a program of research focused around the roles of chirality in the aggregation of the beta amyloid peptide and has published several papers that build upon his initial discovery. His latest discovery shows that the enantiomeric beta amyloid peptide suppresses the formation of toxic oligomers and gives non-toxic fibrils. This finding has been published and featured in Angewandte Chemie.
In recognition of his professional and scientific achievements, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Boulder Peptide Society is pleased to present the award to Jevgenij Raskatov. Dr. Raskatov will present an oral presentation on his research and formally accept the award during the Boulder Peptide Symposium, Sept 24-27, 2018, in Boulder, Colorado.
For more information and to register for the Boulder Peptide Symposium, visit www.boulderpeptide.org.