One significant problem facing peptide drug discovery is that the natural L-peptide leads often suffer rapid degradation from endogenous proteases. Mirror-image techniques provide a solution to this problem. The mirror-image D-forms of natural L-peptides are much more resistant to protease degradation. In addition, D-peptides also tend to be less immunogenic than their L-counterparts or even non-immunogenic. Nevertheless, the construction of D-peptide libraries can be prohibitively costly due to the large numbers of peptide requirement. GenScript constructs libraries with natural L-peptides, which are easily amendable. These libraries are then screened with synthetic mirror-image D-forms of the target proteins to identify potent leads that can guide the synthesis of their mirror-image D-peptides.

GenScript's mirror-image techniques provide a novel drug discovery service. First, the D-enantiomer of the target protein is chemically synthesized and used to isolate natural L-peptide leads from a phage display library or chemically synthesized peptide library. Then the D-enantiomers of the most potent leads are produced for optimization and clinical trials Our service covers the entire early stage of peptide drug discovery, including library screening and functional assays.