2022 The peptide drug market has broad prospects, but it still faces 3 major challenges

[Pharmaceutical Network Market Analysis]

Polypeptide drugs are special drugs between small molecules and protein drugs. They have high activity and safety, strong specificity, good certainty, and good druggability.

They are widely used in many fields such as medicine. Wide range of applications. According to relevant statistics, the global peptide drug market in 2018 has reached 28.5 billion US dollars, accounting for only 2.19% of the global pharmaceutical market, but its growth rate is about twice the overall growth rate of the global pharmaceutical market.

It is expected that the future peptide drug market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.9%, reaching a market size of 49.5 billion US dollars by 2027, with huge room for growth.

In the domestic market, the peptide drug market is also developing rapidly. In 2020, the domestic market scale has reached 35.78 billion yuan. expand. At present, Shengnuo Biosciences in China has an active layout in the field of peptide drugs.

It is worth mentioning that although the market prospect of peptide drugs is promising, many innovative drugs have been proved to be safe and effective. However, the industry also pointed out that many peptide drugs still face three major challenges in the development process, and further breakthroughs are urgently needed.

First, the process research and development capabilities are insufficient.

Most of my country’s pharmaceutical and biological companies are mainly small and medium-sized, with low R&D level. Due to the lack of perfect process R&D capabilities, small biotechnology companies cannot provide platform-based process R&D to support the entire process of their peptide drugs from early clinical to commercialization.

Compared with small molecules, the development of peptide drugs is more complicated, and companies may not be able to meet the challenges themselves, and need to cooperate with other companies at different stages.

Second, capacity resources are limited, and the scale-up complexity is high.

According to the industry, advancing peptide drugs to the late clinical and commercial stage is one of the obstacles recognized by the industry. In the late clinical stage, the drug dosage is large, more production capacity is needed, and the cost increase is obvious. In addition, strict quality and reporting requirements in different countries need to be met, so the scale-up complexity will also be much higher than that in the early clinical stage.

Third, the platform is single and cannot meet the comprehensive needs of clinical development of multiple chemical conjugated drugs.

The successful development of chemically conjugated drugs is a combination of added value in multiple technical fields. For example, the development of drugs conjugated to peptides, in addition to focusing on the synthesis technology, production process, purity and other issues in the field of peptides, also needs to combine payload/linker, Even oligonucleotides and other fields of technology and production capacity. Therefore, the successful development of conjugated drugs oriented to clinical needs is inseparable from the comprehensive layout of related companies in various aspects.

In the face of the above three major challenges, the industry believes that the advantages of CDMO are gradually emerging. It is expected that the CDMO industry of peptide drugs will usher in development opportunities in the future, and relevant companies with a dominant position will obviously benefit. At present, domestic companies in the CDMO field of peptide drugs include Ambio Pharmaceuticals, Sino Bio, Nuotai Bio, Asymchem, etc. according to their income scale.

Recently, the layout of some companies in the field of peptide drug CDMO has attracted the attention of the industry. For example, on January 28, Nuotai Biology stated in its research report that the company currently has 4 early-stage peptide CDMO projects in the process of cooperation. If there are relevant major developments, the company will disclose it in relevant announcements and periodic reports in accordance with the requirements of the listing rules.