Efficiency and effectiveness are key concepts in the development of pharmaceutical drugs. As discussed in the article what are PEG linkers, the pharmaceutical industry is constantly seeking new ways to develop or improve medications using polyethylene glycol (PEG) technology.
One of the growing advancements in drug development is the PEGylation of these drugs to induce better results for patients. PEGylation involves the attachment of a PEG linker to a molecule such as a protein or peptide.
PEGylated products have been proven to be highly beneficial for both the pharmaceutical and research industries due to their biocompatibility. PEG linkers have been found to have low toxicity, immunogenicity, are non-antigenic, and have good water-soluble characteristics. A good example of this is Adagen (Figure 1), which is comprised of the protein Adenosine Deaminase that has 11-17 PEG 5K chains. The drug's size is increased due to the PEG chains, which prevents it from renal clearance and extends the lifetime of the drug. Increasing the length of the PEG linker allows for enhanced solubility and decreases the accessibility for proteolytic enzymes and antibodies.
Over the past 31 years, there have been approximately a dozen FDA approved PEGylated drugs on the market as seen in Table 1 below. PEGs can be used in conjunction with different macromolecules to treat a wide variety of diseases.
Table 1. The following list of ADCs that have been approved by the FDA as of July 2021.
For more information on the different types of PEG polymer types, please read the article Monodispersed and Polydispersed PEG.
As a leading PEG supplier worldwide, BroadPharm offers over 4,000 different PEG Linkers to empower our customer's advanced research. These compounds feature great aqueous solubility, smart choice of PEG length, linear or branched, and a wide selection of functional groups to choose from.