Protein Chemical Synthesis in Drug Discovery

The discovery of novel therapeutics to combat human disease has traditionally been among the most important goals of research chemists. After a century of innovation, state-of-the-art chemical protein synthesis is now capable of efficiently assembling proteins of up to several hundred residues in length from individual amino acids. By virtue of its unique ability to incorporate non-native structural elements, chemical protein synthesis has been seminal in the recent development of several novel drug discovery technologies. In this chapter, we review the key advances in peptide and protein chemistry which have enabled our current synthetic capabilities. We also discuss the synthesis of D-proteins and their applications in mirror image phage-display and racemic protein crystallography, the synthesis of enzymes for structure-based drug discovery, and the direct synthesis of homogenous protein pharmaceuticals.