Major Pharmaceutical Companies & Research Facilities Using Microwave Synthesis to Produce Difficult Peptides

CEM Corporation, the leading provider of microwave laboratory instrumentation, announced today that the Company’s award-wining Liberty™ Microwave Peptide Synthesizer is being implemented by major pharmaceutical companies and research facilities worldwide, including Hoffman-La Roche, AMGEN, Oxford University, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, and Rockefeller University, to produce difficult peptides for drug discovery research.

The Liberty System provides significant benefits in speed, yield enhancements, and product purity, as well as the capability to more easily produce longer and more difficult peptides, such as β-amyloids and chemokine proteins in less than a day.

“This is really an exciting time for us, as this new technology continues to gain acceptance,” said Michael J. Collins, president and CEO of CEM Corporation. “People are discovering just how much more effective and efficient microwave peptide synthesis is than conventional methods, and they are producing longer, more difficult peptides routinely now. In one year, the Liberty has become the best-selling peptide synthesizer on the market.”

CEM established a peptide synthesis laboratory at the Company’s world headquarters in Matthews, North Carolina, where extensive research in chemistry development led to the optimization of the technology and overcame concerns about side reactions such as racemization and aspartimide formation. As a result of this research and the tremendous interest in microwave peptide synthesis, a chapter on the subject will be included in the upcoming scientific reference book Microwaves in Organic Synthesis (J. Wiley & Sons). An article has also been submitted to a significant scientific journal. Additionally, microwave has been shown to be an enabling technology for phosphopeptide synthesis, polyamides, and multi-gram scale up of all of these chemistries.

CEM has placed 40 automated Liberty Systems in the last nine months and offers a manual system as well. The Company expects the strong growth of its Biosciences unit to continue with two new major product introductions for microwave peptide synthesis scheduled for the European Peptide Symposium in Gdansk, Poland in September, and the recent addition of reagents to its product line.