Lipidization as a Tool for Peptide Drug Development

Peptide therapeutics are becoming increasingly important in the quest for effective compounds to treat various difficult-to-cure diseases. As potential therapeutics, peptides have many favorable chemical and pharmacological properties, ranging from their great diversity to their high affinity to various types of natural receptors. However, despite these and other advantages, they also have their pitfalls, such as a very limited stability in the organism. They have a short half-life and tend to be excreted from the body very quickly. In order to achieve a better pharmacological effect, it is desirable to find new means of modifying peptides to enable them to be used as effective drugs. There are many ways of altering the peptide structure. In this review, we summarize the approaches currently used to modify the peptide constitution with a focus on lipidization. Simultaneously this review summarizes all lipidized peptide-based therapeutics that are currently on the market.