Sovicell CEO to host webinar on prolonging peptide half-life

news-releasesSovicell GmbH
November 29th 2014

Leipzig, Germany: – Dr. Hinnerk Boriss, CEO of ADMET testing specialist Sovicell, will host a live webinar on December 2 to share his insights on how to increase the half life of peptide drugs and how to measure albumin and plasma binding of peptide drugs.

The webinar will reveal how modulation of albumin binding can increase peptide half-life from a few hours to several weeks. This can have huge benefits in maximizing the therapeutic and diagnostic efficiency of engineered small proteins and peptides, currently hampered by short in vivo serum half-lives.

Online audience

The Sovicell-sponsored online webinar, hosted by Business Review, is designed for group leaders, heads of laboratories, research scientists, technology and innovation managers and Heads of preclinical R&D.

Key Learning Objectives for the one-hour webinar include:

• Strategies to extend the half-life of peptide drugs
• PH dependence of albumin binding and its consequence in RcRn Receptor recycling
• Use of competitive binding models for measuring dissociation constants
• Technical details and handling of a novel technique for measuring plasma and albumin binding of peptide drugs.

New binding strategy

“More effective strategies to tailor serum persistence are urgently needed,” says Dr. Boriss.
“Existing strategies currently include specialized drug delivery systems, covalent binding to polymers, and non-covalent binding to human serum albumin,” he explained.

The webinar will show how albumin binding can provide the most convenient and safest strategy. Hitherto, optimized albumin binding has been hampered by technical challenges arising from chemical properties of the peptides, which frequently resist diffusion across dialysis or ultrafiltration membranes. This prevents standard devices being used to measure albumin and plasma protein binding.

Enabling effective measurement

“Without being able to measure albumin binding, it is difficult to optimize this attribute. Also, peptides frequently stick to plastic laboratory equipment unless special solubility enhancing buffer systems and plasma help to keep them in solution. In the past, these challenges limited the otherwise convenient and safe approach of optimizing peptide drugs’ albumin binding to extend their half-life,” said Dr. Boriss.

“In this webinar, I will review the currently used approaches to manage the half-life of peptide drugs and present a new technique that facilitates accurate and straightforward albumin and plasma protein binding measurements of peptide drugs,” he said.

The webinar begins at 1500hrs GMT/BST (1000 hrs US Eastern Standard Time) on Tuesday, December 2. Advance registration is free at:
http://www.business-review-webinars.com/webinar/Pharma/Strategies_to_optimize_peptide_drugsacirc_halflife__-ZRtdDh2g/

About Sovicell

Sovicell GmbH is a dedicated provider of the ADME-Tox (ADMET) absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion toxicity tests used in pharmacokinetics.

Sovicell’s range of ADMET-based products and services, enable customers to obtain rapid, accurate and reproducible pharmacokinetic data and side-effect predictions about candidate drugs or other test substances.

Located in the ancient city of Leipzig, Sovicell has established a trustworthy reputation in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries over almost two decades and now has partners in the US, Japan, and India.

Sovicell’s business is based onready-to-use toolkits for ADMET tests thatsupport preclinical research programs in drug discovery and facilitate a shift from labor-intensive “home-brew” approaches to fully automated, minimal labor, processes.

Many of the tests are based on TRANSIL, Sovicell’s proprietary and patented innovative bead-based technology platform that underpins reliable membrane permeability and protein binding assays. TRANSIL addresses current issues in drug discovery by providing assay systems both for soluble polar and lipophilic chemistries.

Dr. Hinnerk Boriss

The chief executive and owner of Sovicell GmbH has been working in drug discovery for more than decade, with more than 25 years experience in sciences at the interface of mathematics and biology.

Dr. Boriss has developed several clinical diagnostic tests and biochemical assays. His specialty is assay development through a combination of mathematical modeling of assay conditions and wet-lab validation.

Hinnerk received his education in biochemistry, theoretical physics and biostatistics from the University of Göttingen, Germany, the University of California Davis, the Max Planck Institute for Limnology and Stanford University.