Mirror image phage display – Generating stable therapeutically and diagnostically active peptides with biotechnological means

Peptides are attracting increasing attention as therapeutics. d-enantiomeric peptides are remarkably resistant to in vivo proteolysis and elicit low immunogenic responses when compared with the respective l-peptides. Therefore, d-peptides can serve as therapeutic and early diagnosis agents for drug development. Here we discuss the application of mirror image phage display in pharmaceutical biotechnology aiming to identify protease resistant d-peptides with biotechnological approaches.

► Peptides are attracting increasing attention as therapeutics.
► Phage display is used to identify peptides with desired properties out from huge libraries.
► Phage display yields peptides that consist of l-enantiomeric amino acid residues.
► l-peptides have disadvantageous properties as compared to d-peptides.
► Mirror image phage display uses all advantages of phage display and yields d-peptides.