Recent Peptide Publications

The German Chemical Society will award Prof. Helma Wennemers the Emil Fischer Medal, its historic prize for organic chemistry, at the ORCHEM conference in Freiburg this September. The honor recognizes her work showing that synthetic peptides can perform tasks nature reserves for far larger molecules.

On July the 5th, the peptide and drug-discovery communities lost one of their greatest pioneers. Dr. Richard Houghten was a visionary scientist whose innovations transformed peptide chemistry, combinatorial chemistry, and modern drug discovery. He was not only an extraordinary researcher but also one of the true architects of the technologies that made it possible to synthesize and screen enormous numbers of compounds efficiently.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Design has just moved into its new labs and offices at the University of Copenhagen, with an official inauguration still ahead. Led by Professor Dek Woolfson, a Fellow of the Royal Society and longtime American Peptide Symposium speaker, the center brings biologists, chemists, drug designers, and computer scientists together to design proteins nature never evolved. Built on a grant of roughly 109 million US dollars, it is one of the clearest signs yet that protein design has become a global scientific priority.