Drugs Based on de novo-developed Peptides are Coming of Age

Naturally evolved peptides, such as the hormone oxytocin or the anti-bacterial vancomycin, have seen decades of success as powerful therapeutics due to many of the favorable properties of peptides. Not every desired target has a naturally occurring bioactive peptide, so rational design and random in vitro evolution techniques have been developed and applied to generate peptide leads de novo. However, can these artificially created peptides be translated into successful therapeutics? Several drug development programs involving de novo-generated peptide ligands have made important progress recently, and we report here on these exciting activities.