Unlocking Peptide Potential with Advanced Contract Powder Processing

TL;DR

Peptides represent a significant, yet delicate, opportunity for nutraceutical and pharmaceutical companies. Many brands, accustomed to spray drying more robust compounds, face challenges with the ultra-fragility of peptides. This discussion highlights how specialized contract powder processing services, particularly those utilizing advanced spray drying techniques, enable companies to integrate peptide products without disrupting existing supply chains or drastically altering cost structures. The key lies in transforming liquid peptides into a stable, robust powder form, often through microencapsulation, such as with cyclodextrin, to ensure extended shelf life and bioavailability. Furthermore, the precise nature of peptide dosages necessitates processing in cleanroom environments, a critical distinction from standard GMP facilities. By leveraging these specialized services, companies can efficiently bring innovative peptide-based products to market, capitalizing on consumer trends and expanding their product lines with a turnkey solution.

Navigating the Fragility of Peptides in Product Development

William: Yeah. There are quite a few and I don’t wanna cut Oily off, but, so she can jump in. But I think there’s, the key ones are, first of all, as I mentioned, these peptides are growing in number. They’re growing in cost. Those are two. They are delicate, which means they’re expensive, hard to handle, require cold chain. People are trying to get away from the cold chain, and therefore, they need stability. There’s there’s a need to handle a high value product, but in a way that doesn’t require special handling. Right? So there’s an irony there. And finally, I would say that people are looking to make them more versatile. Now, if you want peptides and you wanna take advantage of them, you get a vial and a needle, and you inject yourself.

William: And there’s a lot of people who wanna get away from that and a lot of people who are interested in trying them as soon as other options are available. And so I think Tesseract’s mantra internally at this stage is knowing that what we’re working toward is being the company that says, we’re gonna give you what you want, however you want it. Do you want things in oral form? Great. We’re gonna make peptides available in oral form. You want them in another form? We’re gonna adapt them, translate them to another form. Do you want your peptides in a powder filled sleeve so you can make a drink? We’re gonna make that happen.

William: Do you wanna make it more bioavailable? Check. We’ve already done that. Do you wanna take those peptides and that already great bioavailability and condition your body to absorb it even more? Great. Check. We’ve already done that. And then filling out that matrix of all these different axes so that it can be handled without cold chain. It has longer shelf life. It can be deployed across all these applications and all these market segments.

We are making things versatile across all those axes. That’s what we’re doing.

Hendrik: It’s interesting that you bring up that specific perspective of outcomes to the consumer and some of the aspects that you brought up because and correct me if I’m wrong here, but it also seems like a lot of the companies that are maybe interested in getting involved in something like this in offering a product that’s of this nature are likely offering other products that they’re used to being able to spray dry because they’re not necessarily as particular or fragile, so to speak, as these peptides.

Hendrik: It seems like also one of the values that you guys are bringing to the table is also making it so that some of the companies that are looking to get into the peptide space as an offering, you’re also allowing them to keep a similar process to what they’re already used to in the manufacturing of their other products. Whereas, otherwise, they may have to they may have to completely look at a different option than what they’re used to. Is that is that correct to think?

William: Well, that’s that’s very perceptive. And I think Uli can talk about this, but it’s it’s interesting to pick up on that because we haven’t said that yet. We haven’t told you that yet. Clearly, something’s getting through or maybe you’ve been talking to Uli and I haven’t been around, but that’s exactly it., people can people can move forward into the future with a very powerful new product line to take advantage of these consumer trends, the wave that’s coming, capture the revenue, capture the mark margin, serve their existing customer base while attracting new ones, which they very much wanna do without disrupting what they already have. Maybe they embrace a couple of new partners in that supply chain that they’ve already built. But the reality is that we help them keep business as normal, but just drop in a couple new building blocks before growing like mad.

And that’s

Hendrik: That’s what’s most exciting to me because when you were talking about that being the way that you’re serving the end consumer of being able to offer them what they want, how they want it, that was originally where my thought went into because I think it’s exciting that some of these really amazing brands that are already offering great nutraceuticals and great nutrients and different vitamins and other sources in the space can essentially, without changing their supply chain and their general way of doing business or their understanding of product costs or anything like that too drastically, they can pretty easily get into this space by utilizing the services that you guys are frontiering currently, which is awesome because more of those brands, there’s some amazing ones already out there that have a great consumer base that would love to be able to offer peptides, and it feels like this is the most turnkey solution to that.

William: Well, that’s exactly it., people are people have an appetite to participate, I think. And frankly, they’d be foolish not to. But at the same time, an an appetite that’s met with either fear or confusion or just, wondering where do they start because it can be overwhelming. There’s there’s a lot of technology at play. There are a lot of questions. Anytime you’re starting a new line of business or something like that, there’s there’s gonna be doubts about how hard it’s gonna be, all the things that you don’t know. And the things that you don’t know, they add up. It’s a long list. But here, it’s it’s really as simple as one phone call.

Transforming Peptides: From Liquid to Stable Powder

Hendrik: That’s awesome. Moving on to the next. Peptides are one of the fastest growing categories, as we’ve said, in pharma currently. What unique challenges to peptides present for powder processing, and how are you approaching them? I feel like we’ve quite a bit already, but I guess if you had to if you had to really summarize a lot of what we’ve spoken about into this direct question as simply as you could. How would you put that?

William: Well, I think there are a couple things, and I don’t wanna do all the talking. Will, you can tell me if you wanna if wanna start or interrupt here. But was that a yes, you’re gonna interrupt or yes, I should keep talking?

Hendrik: No. No. Please do keep going.

The Strategic Advantage of Specialized Contract Powder Processing

William: Okay. Yeah. She’s always curious what I’m gonna say. See if I put my foot in my mouth too., it’s it’s interesting, Steven. One of the one of the things I find comical is that part of the challenge here is the absolutely tiny dosing. And this is it’s a real issue, but I also address it tongue in cheek, but I think people may find this interesting. We have to create a process powder that’s easy for people to work with downstream. And, ultimately, people are gonna be working with powders, which in some cases, they’re, they’re they’re microgram doses. And it’s important that people not take too large of a dose. We have to make it easy for them, which means we have to make it easy for our partners to make it easy for their customers who were the end users.

William: And when the doses are so small, the value chain, meaning the supply chain, has to find it easy to measure and segment, the doses along the way. And so it’s a real challenge to work with powders that are so highly concentrated in their potency, their efficacy, that when it comes time to segment dosing, you have to be sure that you’re not accidentally overdosing. And so blending down the powders is important and a challenge. And when you’re doing things in bulk, that then goes downstream to any number of partners and any number of geographies and so on, Again, for a number of applications, number of market segments, bunch of different uses, keeping in mind that we’re at the beginning of the value chain, serving lots of partners, lots of applications, lots of geographies.

William: It’s a myriad of permutations. It’s it can be a challenge. If we were just doing an injectable product with a giant vat of liquid and all we were doing was dumping it into small bottles, dispensing it in small bottles, we wouldn’t have to worry about this because the ultimate dosing is somebody sticking a needle in a vial and pulling out, two milliliters or three milliliters or whatever it is, it gets measured individually by a doctor or a patient or somebody, that way.

William: It’s a little different.

But when you’re dealing with powders, it’s it’s it’s a funny problem to have, but it’s a real issue that you have to think about. But, ultimately, the bigger picture and the serious topic is the ultra fragility of the product, the ability to make it robust and a strong, resilient product that is sustainable on the shelf in a complex environment that will serve all these markets and the translation from that liquid form into usually an oral form, which is what people want right now, that can serve all of these markets. If we can do that, then we can serve the entire channel and all of these partners around the globe in doing so because we give them something that they can work with no matter what they’re trying to accomplish, no matter who their partners are.

William: And so the way we do that is with our core technology platform, which allows us to convert a liquid into a powder with this phenomenal manufacturing and drying platform that we have at Advanced Powder Dynamics, the unique way of capturing things in a cyclodextrin, excuse me, that gives them amazing shelf life, and then using our other intellectual property, recapture that molecule when we take it out of the cyclodextrin and put it into any number of market segments, excuse me, in any number of form factors.

Hendrik: Yeah. I just wanna add one quick thing. That, Will already talked about the fact that they’re extremely fragile. They’re extremely expensive, which is, the perfect storm. They have to be work they have to be easy to work with, and they have to we absolutely have to make sure that we can maximize the effectiveness and efficacy of the actual peptide for the consumer. Because while the pept peptides are, we talked about $70,000 a gram and stuff like that, to some extent, this cost is passed down to the consumer. And nobody really wants to pay, 200 or 300 or $400 for a pill bottle or an injection and not see an effect., that is really the last thing you wanna do, particularly because as with all things that go into the body, eventually they’re metabolized.

You’re not gonna just do them once.

Hendrik: You’re going to continue using them on a weekly, on a monthly, on a daily basis. The other thing that I think is very different about peptides is that they have to be processed in a clean room rather than in a regulated good manufacturing processes, GMP, or food grade GMP environment just because they are the dosages are so small, and you really need to avoid any contamination with dust, swirling particles. There’s airlocks involved. There is a quite an elaborate airflow architecture involved. ? So it is, it is, several steps up from, let me call it, regular supplement manufacturing, which, again, adds a level of protection for the consumer, protection for the channel, obviously, protection for the peptides themselves and how they’re being processed to make sure that they maintain the highest possible integrity.

Ulli: That is really interesting. They have to take even a further level of precision to be handled. Correct? Yep. Well, because they’re just in micrograms. Right? They’re fragile. They’re they’re small, and you only give, three hundred micrograms, which is three hundredths of a milligram. Like, that is, how No. Yeah. That’s I think that I think that majority of people probably have a hard time even understanding the a miniscule aspect of that. That’s really interesting., I almost borderline expected the answer to that question to be similar to a bunch of the other questions that we’ve asked before, but I think that was honestly such a unique answer that I didn’t fully expect with it. Moving on to the next one. How do you measure and verify that a biologic maintains its activity and structural integrity after going through this drying process or the way that you process it?