De novo peptide design — PDHC webinar

In peptide discovery programmes, affinity optimization has to improve binding without costing the physicochemical and developability properties a lead needs, and the modifications that help most often lie outside canonical chemistry or require structures and topologies that standard approaches cannot handle — leaving much of the accessible design space out of reach.
‍
In this webinar, Dr Tomi Sawyer (PDHC; Chief Drug Hunter & President at Maestro Therapeutics) looked at where peptide programmes run into these limits in practice. Dr Semen Yesylevskyy, our CSO, showed how affinity optimization is performed in the context of the target, what our benchmarks establish and where they stop, and results from discovery projects that produced peptides with nanomolar affinity. Dr Serhii Starosyla, our CTO, demonstrated the Receptor.AI Peptide Platform running this on a real lead, with non-canonical chemistry and constrained topologies included. Dr Alan Nafiiev, our CEO, closed with how drug discovery teams can evaluate the platform on their own peptides.

‍