Therapeutic peptide development: an in silico perspective.
Title: Therapeutic peptide development: an in silico perspective.
Speaker: Professor Pierre Tufféry (Paris Cite University)
Time: Monday, December 1, 2025, 10:00 a.m. -11:00 a.m.
Venue: Room 207, Building B6, College of Biology and Biological Engineering
Organizers: School of Biology and Biological Engineering, International Joint Laboratory of Synthetic Biology and Pharmaceutical Preparation of the Ministry of Education
Abstract: Peptide based drugs, traditionally disregarded compared to small compounds therapeutics, have now become plausible candidates for therapeutic development. The recent years have seen the emergence of blockbuster peptide-based therapeutics such as Semaglutide or Tirzepatide that target obesity, and have got cumulated sales for over 40 billion dollars in 2024. This motivates efforts to identify peptide candidates, particularly targeting protein-protein interactions or membrane receptors. Peptide candidate identification can take advantage of in silico approaches that have been setup during the last decade, for the prediction of their structure, in isolation or with their target, and for their optimization. We will review the in silico developments that have been undergone at our team, and attempt to propose a prospective vision of how in silico approaches could contribute in the near future.
Speaker Biography: Dr. Pierre Tufféry, a professor and doctoral supervisor at the University of Paris Cite in France, is the deputy director of the French National Center for Scientific Research 8251 (CNRS UMR 8251) and the director of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research 1133 (Inserm ERL 1133). For a long time, he has been engaged in research on the construction of computational models for protein-ligand interactions, the design and development of therapeutic peptides, and synthetic biology. His research achievements have been successively published in internationally renowned journals such as Chem Soc Rev., Nucleic Acids Res., Drug Discov Today., and Biomolecules, with over 100 papers published.