CEMS Alumni Paridhi Agrawal Recognized with Award for Advancing Sustainable Peptide Manufacturing

Congratulations to CEMS alumni Paridhi Agrawal (ChE, '20) for receiving the Lilly Research Labs President’s Award, the highest technical distinction at Eli Lilly. The award spotlights the bold innovation, deep collaboration, and relentless dedication that define Lilly’s culture and drive the company’s mission to make life better for people around the world. Every year, the awards recognize and celebrate outstanding individuals and teams whose efforts reflect the spirit of scientific curiosity and patient-centered purpose. Paridhi and her team at Eli Lilly won the award under the “Experiment Boldly” category that recognizes bold innovation for their work “Driving Efficiency and Sustainability Through a Novel Liquid-Phase Peptide Manufacturing Process”.

The pharmaceutical industry faces an urgent sustainability crisis in synthetic peptide manufacturing. With therapeutic peptides now ranking among the world's highest selling drugs, and over 1 billion people worldwide living with obesity, the demand for medicines such as tirzepatide is huge. However, traditional solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) presents several barriers to sustainable scale-up of high-volume synthetic peptides due to its reliance on specialized equipment and starting resin, high process mass intensity (PMI), use of chemicals of concern as bulk reagents, cumbersome and unreliable analytical testing to assess solid phase reaction performance, and challenging scale-up performance prediction.

Paridhi and team developed a fully liquid-phase peptide synthesis (LPPS) approach and applied it to the synthesis of a tirzepatide (30−39) fragment intermediate, which is also a common amino acid sequence for numerous other therapeutic incretin molecules. This method leverages Fmoc- and Cbz-protecting group strategies to generate high-purity crystalline pentamers via solution-phase synthesis that are deemed regulatory starting materials. Subsequent solution phase assembly of the pentamers yields the desired decapeptide. The LPPS approach was compared and shown to be superior to the conventional SPPS approach across all key metrics, including sustainability, PMI, manufacturability, supply chain resilience, throughput, and cost. This advancement to peptide synthesis technology, recently published in Org. Proc. Res. Dev. (read the article at their website), not only promotes more sustainable peptide synthesis but also supports improved quality and consistency in peptide-based medicines.