Application of Peptides

It is mainly divided into medical peptide drugs, peptide antibiotics, vaccines, agricultural antimicrobial peptides, feed peptides, daily chemical cosmetics, food soy peptides, corn peptides, yeast peptides, and sea cucumber peptides.


From a functional perspective, it can be divided into antihypertensive peptides, antioxidant peptides, cholesterol lowering peptides, opioid active peptides, high F-value oligopeptides, food flavor peptides, and so on.

Active peptides are closely related to nutrition, hormones, enzyme inhibition, immune regulation, antibacterial, antiviral, and antioxidant properties. Peptides are generally divided into peptide drugs and peptide health products. Traditional peptide drugs are mainly peptide hormones, and the development of peptide drugs has expanded to various fields of disease prevention and treatment, especially in the following areas where development is rapid.

Antitumor peptides

The occurrence of tumors is the result of multiple factors, but ultimately involves the regulation of oncogene expression. In 2013, many genes related to tumors and regulatory factors that affect tumors were discovered. Screening for peptides that specifically bind to these genes and regulatory factors has become a new hot spot in the search for anti-cancer drugs. Somatostatin has been used to treat endocrine tumors in the digestive system; American scholars have discovered a hexapeptide that can significantly inhibit adenocarcinoma in vivo; Swiss scientists have discovered an octapeptide that can induce apoptosis in tumor cells.


Viruses adsorb cells by binding to specific receptors on host cells, relying on their own specific proteases for protein processing and nucleic acid replication. Therefore, peptides that bind to host cell receptors or can bind to active sites such as viral proteases can be screened from the peptide library for antiviral therapy. In 2013, countries such as Canada and Italy have screened many small peptides with antiviral toxicity from their peptide libraries, and some small peptides have entered the clinical trial stage. In June 2004, the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that the important direction project of the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, "Research on SARS Coronavirus Cell Fusion Mechanism and Fusion Inhibitor", which was undertaken by the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Modern Virology Research Center of the Academy of Life Sciences of Wuhan University, had made significant progress in cooperation. The experiment proved that the HR2 polypeptide designed by the Institute could effectively inhibit the infection of SARS virus on cultured cells, and the effective inhibitory concentration was several nanomoles. The virus infection inhibition experiment of the synthetic and expressed HR1 polypeptide and the in vitro binding experiment of HR1 and HR2 also made important progress. The polypeptide drug developed by the Institute to prevent SARS virus fusion could The prevention of virus infection can prevent the further expansion of the virus in the body for patients who have been infected with the virus. This peptide drug has a dual function of prevention and treatment. Researchers from the Cell Engineering Research Center of the Fourth Military Medical University have synthesized 9 peptides that can effectively prevent and inhibit the invasion of SARS virus into cells.