Date: 27 November 2025 | Category: News
Vapourtec’s Peptide-BuilderTM has completed another highly successful week-long demonstration, this time in Professor David Spring’s laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Operating continuously day, night and over the weekend, the system synthesized around 50 peptides of varying lengths and complexity. All sequences were delivered with exceptional crude purity, further highlighting the Peptide-Builder’s potential to transform solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS).
Advancing SPPS Through Continuous-Flow Technology
Peptides are central to modern drug discovery, biotechnology, and the development of advanced materials. However, conventional batch-based SPPS can be hindered by slow cycle times, complex purifications, and limited process data. The Peptide-Builder addresses these challenges with its continuous-flow architecture, offering faster synthesis cycles, higher crude purities and full end-to-end traceability.
A Week of High-Intensity Testing
Throughout the week, the system was evaluated with a wide variety of sequences, from short peptides to longer, more challenging, and modified peptide chains. The team successfully incorporated unnatural amino acids, performed acetylation, and worked across multiple resin types, all within a fully automated workflow.
Post-doctoral researcher Dr Etienne Bonvin highlighted the impact of crude purity and data availability: “The remarkably high crude purity, with a single peak, significantly simplifies downstream purification, while the accompanying synthesis report offers critical insight, allowing us to confirm that each reaction proceeded correctly and to differentiate authentic synthetic challenges from artefacts such as cleavage irregularities or unexpected HPLC responses.”
Each run generated a comprehensive PDF report covering Fmoc deprotection profiles, aggregation events and detailed process records – information that supports sequence optimization, reduces material usage and streamlines troubleshooting.
PhD researcher Daria Wanic also praised the platform’s usability: “It’s a very intuitive system, you can just turn it on, load a cartridge and run a synthesis.”
The demonstration confirmed that fast-flow peptide synthesis integrates smoothly into a busy, multi-user academic laboratory, delivering reliable peptide production whether supervised during the day or left running overnight.
A Platform Designed for Modern Peptide Science
The Peptide-Builder is a compact, fully automated synthesizer engineered to bring the advantages of flow chemistry to SPPS. Its rapid cycle times, high purities, open-access design, and capacity to synthesize 16 peptides unattended, for example over a weekend, make it ideally suited for both academic laboratories and industrial R&D environments.
Reflecting on the demonstration, Dr Manuel Nuño commented: “We are extremely grateful to Professor Spring and his team for hosting this demonstration and for their invaluable feedback. It has reinforced the years of development and collaboration with peptide scientists that have shaped the Peptide-Builder. We are confident this technology will continue to help researchers simplify, accelerate, and modernise their peptide workflows.”
Supporting Innovation at the University of Cambridge
The visit aligns closely with the Spring group’s pioneering peptide research, including the development of stapled peptides, macrocyclic peptides designed to stabilise α-helical structures and enhance biological function.
With global demand for high-quality peptides continuing to rise, the Peptide-Builder offers a scalable, reproducible, and future-ready solution for laboratories working at the forefront of peptide science.