Richard A. Houghten

Richard Houghten earned his B.S. in chemistry from California State University, Fresno, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley (1975). After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, he held an assistant professorship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine before joining The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, where he worked with Richard Lerner.

In 1985, Houghten published what would become his most influential paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, introducing the "tea-bag" method for simultaneous multiple peptide synthesis. The approach encloses resin-bound peptides in small, solvent-permeable polypropylene mesh packets that are dipped sequentially through reagent solutions, allowing systematic building of multiple peptide chains in parallel. The method's elegance lies in its simplicity: by tracking each bag through different coupling steps, hundreds of related peptides can be synthesized simultaneously with minimal equipment.

Houghten extended this work into combinatorial chemistry, demonstrating that the tea-bag and split-and-mix approaches could generate libraries containing millions of peptides for screening. A landmark 1991 Nature paper showed how a library of more than 34 million hexapeptides could be systematically deconvoluted to identify optimal peptide ligands. This work helped establish the field of synthetic peptide combinatorial libraries as a practical tool for drug discovery.

In the 1980s, Houghten founded three companies: Multiple Peptide Systems (1986), the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies (1988), and Houghten Pharmaceuticals (1990). TPIMS, a nonprofit biomedical research organization now headquartered in Port St. Lucie, Florida, has become internationally recognized for research spanning infectious disease, pain management, cancer, diabetes, and novel approaches to drug discovery.

Houghten's contributions have been recognized with the Vincent du Vigneaud Award (2000), the Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry (2004), and the R. Bruce Merrifield Award (2005). He co-chaired the 17th American Peptide Symposium in San Diego (2001) and co-edited its proceedings volume, Peptides: The Wave of the Future. He is a Fellow of both AAAS and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Sciences. His publication record includes over 500 peer-reviewed papers and more than 90 U.S. patents.