Professor Rong Mingqiang of PedeBio: Building a Natural Peptide Library to Drive Innovation in Peptide Drug Discovery from the Source

Recently, at the China Pharmaceutical Industry Chain New Resources Conference held in Nanjing, the Peptide Industry Innovation and Development Special Session brought together numerous enterprise representatives from within the industry to jointly discuss the latest advancements in the peptide drug field, ranging from research and development to production. Among them,Professor Rong Mingqiang, Chairman of PDBio, delivered a speech titled "Natural Peptides and Drug Development," providing a detailed introduction to the importance of discovering natural peptide molecules and the advantages of related drug development.

Chengdu PDBio Co. Ltd. was founded in May 2021 by Rong Mingqiang, a professor and doctoral supervisor from Hunan Normal University. Relying mainly on the technologies of two national key peptide platforms, the company has established teams for venomous animal collection, peptide active molecule discovery, peptide drug screening, peptide new drug research and development, and industrialization. It deeply explores animal peptides, constructs a natural active peptide molecular library, a "high-throughput + cloud computing" screening platform, and an AI artificial intelligence platform for peptide drug screening, enabling batch R&D innovation of peptide drugs, with the ultimate goal of bringing multiple new drugs to market.

The following is a summary of Professor Rong Mingqiang's speech highlights:

In the past two years, the peptide drug market has continued to grow in an explosive manner. The tremendous success of semaglutide has had a profound impact on the peptide drug market, not only achieving great economic success and expanding the market space for peptide drugs, but also playing a positive role in promoting technological innovation in peptide drugs.

However, compared with small-molecule drugs, the variety and number of peptide drugs on the market are relatively limited, which, to a certain extent, reflects the R&D challenges faced by peptide drugs.

Professor Rong Mingqiang introduced,The core reason why there are relatively few peptide drugs today lies in the numerous obstacles present at the source of innovation.Currently, it is difficult to obtain samples of polypeptide molecules. Even when sampling from a large number of organisms, only a small number of samples can be obtained. Due to the difficulty in acquisition, there are fewer molecules available for peptide drugs at the start of research, which limits subsequent modification and development work. This means that,The development of polypeptide drugs is mainly restricted because this field has not been fully explored at its source.

To overcome these challenges, the construction of a natural peptide molecule library is particularly important, as it will provide researchers with the foundation to screen more natural peptides and discover new therapeutic candidates.

This is the most important task that PDBio has been working on since its establishment. To promote the transformation of scientific research achievements, PDBio was born based on years of valuable academic results. The company adopts a BT+IT strategy to explore peptide components within venomous animals.

According to statistics of existing peptide drugs, endogenous peptides currently dominate. Besides human peptides, toxin peptides are noteworthy. First, the components of venom from toxic animals possess high biological activity, which is a highly desirable characteristic in drug development. Second, over 95% of the components found in the venom of studied toxic animals have entirely new sequence structures, indicating that they represent unexplored novel substances.

Therefore,Active ingredients in animal venoms, due to their high activity and novelty, can provide more opportunities for the development of new drugs and have potential in terms of drugability.Although the difficulty of developing new drugs from the venom of poisonous animals is significant, this indicates a high barrier in the field, which can create core competitive advantages. This is also an important reason why PDBio focuses on the research and development of peptide drugs from poisonous animals.

Currently, among the toxin peptide drugs that have been marketed or entered clinical trials, most are based on snake toxins, focusing on cardiovascular system diseases. Foreign researchers are also studying venomous animals, but only limited to one or two species, while PDBio is currently the only team conducting large-scale, systematic research on venomous animals.

Mining natural peptide molecules from animal toxins is no easy task. Traditional methods for studying the active components of venomous animals are inefficient and time-consuming, leading to slow research progress. Take exenatide as an example: it was extracted from the venom of the Gila monster and only after extensive research was the active molecule identified, eventually evolving into semaglutide, which achieved enormous commercial success.

This means that the original innovative molecules provided by animal venom have the potential to become blockbuster products, driving the development of the entire industry. It is estimated that the number of toxic animal peptide sequences in genomic databases may range from 10,000 to 20,000, but in reality, there could be billions, representing a vast, underutilized treasure trove. Advances in modern technology will facilitate the discovery of new peptide molecules, and PDBio hopes that through the team's continued efforts, it can bring substantial benefits to human health and the industry.

PDBio adopts a BT+IT strategy to establish a natural peptide molecule library, accelerating the discovery of new natural peptide molecules. Based on biomics, the company systematically identifies proteins and peptides in venom through genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic research after collecting venom from venomous animals.According to Professor Rong Mingqiang, this method can collect protein information at the million level. The company will also use its self-developed software for integrated analysis, thereby selecting 20,000 to 30,000 active peptides.

Based on this R&D strategy,PDBio Began Building a Natural Peptide Molecular Library in 2022, Collecting Over 2,000 Species in Less Than Two Years; This Natural Peptide Molecular Library Will Include a Physical Molecular Library in the Hundreds of Thousands and a Virtual Molecular Library in the Hundreds of Millions.

Currently, PDBio has made breakthroughs in the research and development of new drugs based on natural peptides, demonstrating the valuable worth of its natural peptide molecular library.

In the field of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), PDBio is developing a novel IPF inhibitor, using pirfenidone as the control drug. Through a natural peptide library, PDBio has identified a new peptide molecule with a unique sequence, high activity, and high selectivity. This peptide molecule has demonstrated unique efficacy: first, it showed lower hepatic and renal toxicity in experiments, and in IPF disease model mice, this molecule is the only compound that can restore the activity and body weight of the mice to normal levels within a short period. PDBio has also innovated in the formulation selection for IPF inhibitors by developing an inhalation preparation that directly targets the lungs. The molecule shows superior therapeutic potential in terms of dosage, efficacy, and safety.

In addition, PDBio is also developing another entirely new peptide structure. In this year's research progress, this molecule has achieved a certain level of activity. Administered through intranasal delivery, this molecule can inhibit calcium currents in the central nervous system, showing promising therapeutic effects for trigeminal neuralgia, while also effectively alleviating inflammatory pain associated with osteoarthritis.

In terms of business model, PDBio has adopted the "self-research, licensing, and CRO" model. In addition to independently developing the aforementioned pipelines, it also provides CRO services to other companies with new drug development needs. In the future, PDBio will focus on establishing a natural peptide molecule library and researching its self-developed pipelines, while looking forward to collaborating with more industry partners to jointly promote the development of the peptide industry.