Can peptides be considered as good therapeutic candidates?

Although peptides are fantastic candidates to target protein-protein
interactions in vitro, they lack metabolic stability and cellular permeability to be good therapeutic candidates. However, several naturally occuring peptides of mostly fungal and bacterial origin have found tremendous application as therapeutics. Thus, in the first part of the talk I would focus on N-methylation of peptide bonds as a strategy to improve pharmacological properties of peptides. The second part of the talk would deal with future research plans with lessons learnt from nature. Here, initially I would deal with a forward chemical genetics approach to obtain novel peptides (linear and cyclic) to perturb multitude of signaling processes inside cells. Finally I would hypothesise a strategy to efficiently deliver protein-cargoes in the cytoplasm, which is a bottleneck in the effective delivery of therapeutic proteins into the cells.