Enzymes, recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, viral vectors… Biological pharmaceutical products are essential for research and increasingly present in human medicine, where they constitute a growing market: 8 of the 10 most profitable pharmaceutical products in 2019 were biomedicines, and the movement has further accelerated with anti-Covid vaccines, show the annual reports of
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
.
But if their complexity is their strength, it is also their weakness.
"
Biomedicines
are much larger molecules than chemical drugs, with atoms hundreds or thousands of times more numerous
," explains Bruno Marco-Dufort, doctoral student in the Macromolecular Engineering and Organic Chemistry Laboratories of the School. Federal Polytechnic of Zurich (Switzerland).
“So these are very complex products, and their properties come from their structure.
If something makes them change shape...
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