Peptide Therapeutics - ARI

Our Research

Many human diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, are caused by proteins that misfold, meaning they change their three-dimensional structure away from what the cell requires. In doing so, they take on new behaviors that can actively disrupt normal cellular function. Combating protein misfolding has proven extremely difficult because these proteins are flexible and lack the well-defined pockets that conventional drugs are designed to target. As a result, many proteins that misfold are considered "undruggable," and there are still almost no therapies that slow these diseases rather than just managing their symptoms.

Peptides, which are short strings of amino acids, offer a potential solution to this problem. Because peptides are built from the same building blocks as their protein targets, they can recognize the dynamic surfaces that other drug candidates cannot. Moreover, their modular chemistry can be fine-tuned in ways that offer exquisite control over their activity.

In the Peptide Therapeutics stream, we are working to harness the power of peptides to address protein misfolding diseases by identifying vulnerabilities in target proteins and optimizing molecules to address those opportunities.

Our research efforts include:

Our Strategy

Students design, build, and test real molecules from day one. Each student takes ownership of a peptide, synthesizes and characterizes it, and then evaluates it through a shared set of experiments so that everyone's results can be compared directly. Because the whole class runs
the same workflow on different molecules, we operate as a single research team, and a project can be passed from one student to the next as our map of the protein grows.

Peptide Therapeutics researchers learn how to:

Our Impact

By targeting protein misfolding, this research opens new pathways for therapeutics where conventional pharmacology has hit a wall. Validating peptides as effective tools against flexible, unstructured target sites provides a blueprint for drugging complex biological systems.

Beyond the immediate targets, establishing a high-throughput, parallelized peptide discovery platform accelerates the rate at which candidate molecules can be screened and optimized. This scalable model generates dense datasets on peptide-protein interactions, delivering foundational insight to the broader scientific community working to halt progressive neurodegenerative diseases.