A mini-review and perspective on multicyclic peptide mimics of antibodies

Affinity reagents are important tools in the biological sciences for understanding biological processes and for studying protein expression, localization and interactions. However, traditional affinity reagents such as antibodies (and their fragments) and non-immunoglobulin (non-Ig) scaffold binders, usually suffer from problems of poor cellular uptake efficiency, high production cost, and low structural stability. This leads to rapid development of small antibody-like affinity reagents such as scaffold-free cyclic and multicyclic peptides, which usually have 5-30 amino acid residues, thus lying between non-Ig scaffolds and small molecules in size. In this mini-review, we highlight the recent development in mono- and multi-cyclic peptide mimics of antibodies, including cyclic peptide affinity reagents that have been developed for use in antibody-like applications, novel synthetic strategies for multicyclic peptides, and promising peptide library screening platforms. We also provide a perspective on the future development in multicyclic peptide mimics of antibodies. (C) 2018 Chinese Chemical Society and Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.