Cambridge Research Biochemicals Expands Peptide Manufacturing Capacity

Cambridge Research Biochemicals has announced that it has made a substantial investment in its peptide manufacturing capacity by buying the first Overture™ Robotic Peptide Library Synthesizer to be installed in Europe.

Overture is one of the most powerful and sophisticated peptide synthesisers in the world and will enable CRB to offer its customers working in drug discovery and development a much faster, more flexible service.

In the constant search for new disease-causing target molecules, the peptide libraries produced by Overture can identify the vitally important epitopes that cause peoples’ immune systems to react and which may be the key to developing new treatments.

According to Dr Laurent Caron, Peptide Core Technology Manager at CRB, “The benefit that will be most apparent to our customers will be the ability of Overture's cutting-edge design to speed up the synthesis of peptides and tackle increasingly challenging molecules. The Overture allows simultaneous synthesis of up to 96 compounds, including libraries of overlapping peptides for epitope mapping, alanine-scanning libraries, positional scanning libraries, random libraries, truncation peptide libraries and scrambled peptide libraries for sequence optimization.”

Alison White, Operations Director at CRB added “The Overture will be a significant asset in helping CRB to maintain its leading position as a high quality peptide manufacturer in a fast moving and evolving market. This is the second investment in expanding peptide production capacity that we have made in the last 6 months following our acquisition at the end of 2010 of a Liberty Peptide Synthesizer which uses microwave technology to make higher purity peptides up to 10 times faster than by conventional methods.”