{"id":402,"date":"2025-02-14T23:30:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-14T23:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/?page_id=402"},"modified":"2026-04-08T08:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T14:49:08","slug":"directed-evolution-of-drugs-ripp-display","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/directed-evolution-of-drugs-ripp-display\/","title":{"rendered":"Directed Evolution of Drugs: RiPP Display"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><b>Due to the successes of therapeutics like the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41392-024-01931-z\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">GLP-1 agonists<\/a>, peptide drugs have recently begun<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to gain popularity with pharmaceutical companies, with an average of one a year now being approved by the FDA. Specifically, macrocyclic peptide compounds have become especially prevalent in drug development because of their\u00a0 favorable pharmaceutical properties, including improved cell permeability, metabolic stability, and a lower entropic binding penalty relative to their linear counterparts. The pharmaceutical industry has used these characteristics to design macrocyclic peptide drugs that treat cancer, viral infections, and bacterial infections. Despite these early successes, there remains a vast, undrugged biological space to explore.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-593\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Display_1-2-300x148.png\" alt=\"Comparison chart of therapeutic modalities by size and properties. Small molecules (500\u20131000 Da) are described as stable, cell-permeable, non-immunogenic, but often non-specific and not evolvable. Peptides (1000\u20135000 Da) retain stability and permeability while offering selectivity and evolvability, with the ability to target challenging (\u201cundruggable\u201d) sites; an example structure (darobactin) is shown. Monoclonal antibodies (&gt;150,000 Da) are large, selective, and evolvable but typically unstable, immunogenic, and not cell-permeable, illustrated with an antibody structure.\" width=\"815\" height=\"402\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Display_1-2-300x148.png 300w, https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Display_1-2-1024x506.png 1024w, https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Display_1-2-768x379.png 768w, https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Display_1-2-1536x759.png 1536w, https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Display_1-2.png 1660w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 815px) 100vw, 815px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC7864896\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">RiPPs<\/a> are a diverse group of natural products<\/strong> that have been observed to have unique pharmacological properties, including antibacterial, anticancer, and antibacterial activities. Through their novel enzyme chemistry to form uniquely constrained macrocycles, RiPPs offer enormous untapped wealth of therapeutically-privileged scaffolds to design the next generation of peptide therapeutics. T<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">he rising popularity of peptide therapeutics has led us to direct our knowledge about RiPP pathways towards engineering new peptide therapeutic leads. These efforts are based on utilizing mRNA display technology to screen millions of substrate sequences to discover new high-affinity binders of valuable therapeutic targets. In mRNA display technology, the translated peptide is linked to its encoding mRNA sequence enabling the recovery\/identification of the peptide binders through sequencing upon panning the displayed libraries against the target of interest. This technology can also probe the substrate scope of RiPP biosynthetic enzymes, providing massive datasets that shine light on how these enzymes perform their unique chemistry. Our lab is in the early stages of harnessing this library display technology to identify new RiPP-derived therapeutic leads to help fill this gap and begin treating untreated or poorly treated diseases.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-404\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Generic-RiPP-Display-Website-300x123.png\" alt=\"Diagram illustrating a workflow for discovering ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) using mRNA display. A highly diverse DNA library (&gt;10\u00b9\u00b2 variants) is expressed via a \u201cclick display\u201d system to generate peptide\u2013mRNA conjugates with a leader peptide, variable core region, and puromycin linker. These constructs undergo RiPP biosynthesis, followed by affinity selection against an immobilized target. Bound sequences are recovered as cDNA, sequenced using NovaSeqX, and analyzed to characterize hits, completing an iterative selection cycle.\" width=\"717\" height=\"294\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Generic-RiPP-Display-Website-300x123.png 300w, https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Generic-RiPP-Display-Website-768x315.png 768w, https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-main\/lab-prd\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/224\/2025\/02\/Generic-RiPP-Display-Website.png 986w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 717px) 100vw, 717px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Due to the successes of therapeutics like the GLP-1 agonists, peptide drugs have recently begun to gain popularity with pharmaceutical companies, with an average of one a year now being approved by the FDA. Specifically, macrocyclic peptide compounds have become especially prevalent in drug development because of their\u00a0 favorable pharmaceutical properties, including improved cell permeability,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page_onecolumn.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-402","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/577"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":918,"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/402\/revisions\/918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.vanderbilt.edu\/mitchell-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}