The Peptide Conference 2011

This year, the Peptide Conference 2011 organised by Avakado media was taking place at Chilford Hall Vineyard and Conference Centre in Linton, Cambridge (UK). The event attracted a lot of sponsors but delegates still had to pay a steep 895 Euros to have the privilege to attend. As expected, the attendance was on the low side. After picking up a hire car at Cambridge Station, I drove to Linton which was fairly easy to locate but could not find the Vineyard (my satnav was suggesting strange things and I ignored it!). After enjoying the countryside for some time, I decided to ask a local and finally arrived at the venue. The conference was taking place in a barn, which was slightly strange but a pleasant change.

The first session entitled Peptide Structure and Drug Discovery was a succession of talks from various peptide companies. Sadly, the attention was not always in the detail and some presentations lacked depth. Thankfully, Don Wellings saved the day with some interesting ideas.

Don is a regular speaker at peptide meetings. He is interested in developing cheap technologies for peptide synthesis and is trying to raise interest in his glass beads technology. The idea is to use cheap jewellery beads made on ton scale and coat them with a resin for peptide synthesis.  Another idea is to polymerise oligolysines (made by bacterial fermentation for use as food preservatives) using various cross-linkers.

The second session (Peptide Therapeutics) mainly involved institutional and academic speakers. Mike Gait (Medical Research Council), a world expert in the synthesis of analogues of DNA/RNA such as Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNAs) and Peptide Morpholinos (PMOs) presented some work on the conjugation of analogues to Cell Penetrating Peptides (CPPs). Mike is a very engaging speaker and his presentations are always full of good content. Later, Prof. Rob Lizkamp (Utrecht University) described some dendrimer constructs and some discontinuous epitopes mimicry using his scaffolds. The paper is available online (free of charge!) if you are interested in the triazacyclophane (TAC) scaffold.

Mixed feelings at the end of conference, some good and some bad…