Peptides have become a staple in cosmetic and wellness formulations, celebrated for their ability to signal, stimulate, and support biological processes in skin, hair, and elsewhere in the body. Products with the best peptide ingredients are better placed
to compete in crowded markets.
However, owing to restrictions in manufacturing, the vast potential of larger peptides remains largely untapped by the beauty industry. The creation of a library of proprietary manufacturing Baker’s yeast strains optimised using QTL technology is set to change this, allowing scalable, high-quality large peptides to be supplied at prices compatible with beauty industry cost of goods.
No commercial manufacture, no point
To deliver the edge needed in crowded beauty markets, the key requirement of peptide ingredients is to deliver the benefits consumers want. Having established the correct peptides, commercial viability requires a manufacturing process that can produce them at low cost and high quality (matching the exact specification of each), all at the requisite scale.
The lack of manufacturing solutions for large peptides that meet these commercial criteria mean this large pool of potential ingredients has been mainly ignored.
The bottleneck
Existing beauty peptide ingredients are predominantly manufactured by solid state synthesis, a chemical process that involves assembling the peptide by adding one amino acid at a time. As each amino acid is attached, it can bind in multiple ways, creating scope for the assembly to deviate from the intended specification at each step in the process.
For larger peptides, this results in a high attrition rate with product either thrown away or, if the correct batch analytics are not applied, peptides being used which no longer have the characteristics necessary to deliver the benefits that they have been selected for.
These attrition rates create high cost, substantial waste, variability in quality, problems with scaling and a high environmental footprint with poor sustainability credentials. Furthermore, many large peptides simply cannot be made using this method due to their complexity.
E. coli is also used to manufacture certain peptides but, as a prokaryote, it lacks the membrane-bound organelles needed for complex peptide processing. This limits the range of products that it can make and, when used for peptide manufacture, there are often deficiencies in folding and post-translational modifications, as well as higher risks of endotoxin contaminants. Such deficiencies are critical, as they result in the peptide being ineffective or the formulation being harmful. The increasing importance of evidence in support of market claims and the premium placed by consumers on robust validatory testing mean such nuances of detailed peptide and formulation chemistry are rapidly becoming essential.
Optimise to deliver commercial large peptide ingredients
Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Baker’s yeast) has been used to manufacture biological products since the inception of the biotechnology industry and is ideally suited to the manufacture of low cost, high-quality proteins and peptides at scale.
However, the development of individual, bespoke strains Baker’s yeast strains for each peptide of interest is an involved and expensive process. Furthermore, the traditional approach of modifying an established genetic chassis with incremental changes is highly unlikely to deliver an optimised manufacturing strain. When the commercial requirements for production include precise quality, low cost, and large scale, lacking an optimised strain will most likely condemn the time and money invested in a peptide project.
Phenotyepca has applied its proprietary QTL technology to address this issue, generating a library of Baker’s yeast strains with high genetic diversity. The gene sequence of any peptide of interest can be screened across this library using a proprietary 2-micron plasmid to quickly establish whether a viable means of manufacture is possible. Thereafter, the best-performing strains from the library are selected and bred across multiple generations to attain a final strain that is optimised to industrial conditions.
The potential spoils of large peptide ingredients
The entry of optimised recombinant manufacture of large peptides opens up the vast potential of this substantial domain of chemistry.
As it stands, some organisations have already identified proteins of interest endogenous to the skin or hair, while others have highlighted large non-endogenous peptides for their potential. However, without access to reliable, high-quality manufacturing, projects involving these peptides may have been shelved.
Furthermore, peptide libraries and databases can now be screened to identify new breakthrough ingredients for inclusion in the next generation of products. But, once again, large peptides identified in this manner face critical manufacturing issues.
As the industry increasingly seeks to harness the power of biotechnology to innovate and differentiate products, avoiding innovation and the potential of peptides looks certain to become the high-risk option. The pace of innovation is accelerating and the entry of scalable recombinant manufacture unlocks large peptides as part of this new wave of ingredients.
Conclusion
Large peptides remain a broadly untapped resource in the race to discover ingredients that deliver the benefits consumers seek in their beauty products. Their underutilisation is, in large part, a consequence of the inaccessibility and unaffordability of manufacture at a commercial scale.
The entry of QTL technology and the strain libraries it has produced offers just such a means of manufacture, unlocking large peptides at commercial scale. For companies that have already identified such peptides, or those with the means of screening peptide libraries, a new opportunity beckons.
