Bioactive Peptides in Drug Discovery and Design: Medical Aspects

Peptide research on drug discovery and design is an important field in the development of "peptide mimetics", with the potential to generate important new drugs. Peptides control numerous body processes, and, as such, represent an untapped wellspring of new drugs for treating a variety of diseases. Therefore, the challenge of this decade is to produce small molecules which mimic peptides and proteins, in order to overcome the ineffectiveness of peptides as drugs when administered orally. The use of small-molecule combinatorial libraries is expected to have a tremendous impact on drug discovery for both the development and optimisation of new leads.
This work includes synthesis, function, structure-activity relationships, conformation, biology and molecular dynamics, while important peptides such as Angiotensin II, Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone, Thrombin Receptor, Myelin and Antigenic Peptides.