Gyros Protein Technologies traces its origins to Tucson, Arizona, where researchers from Victor J. Hruby’s laboratory at the University of Arizona founded Protein Technologies, Inc. in 1985. For four decades, the company has developed automated solid-phase peptide synthesis instrumentation that responds to how peptide science is practiced, growing from single-vessel synthesis to parallel and pilot-scale platforms serving drug discovery, neoantigen research, and therapeutic peptide development.
This presentation revisits that history through the engineering decisions that defined each instrument generation: the pneumatic valve block of the PS3 (1990), which established the fluidic design principles the company still builds on; the matrix valve system of the Symphony® (1993), purpose-built for the throughput demands of combinatorial chemistry; and the per-vessel induction heating and modular architecture of the PurePep® Chorus (2019), designed for the diverse synthesis requirements of modern R&D.
Today, EU REACH restrictions on DMF pose new demands on synthesis workflows. We will present work exploring BuOAc/DMSO binary solvent systems as alternatives to DMF on the PurePep Chorus, using induction heating and evaluated on multiple model peptides and liraglutide [1,2]. Binary solvent systems yielded crude purities comparable to DMF. Paired with catch-and-release technology via PEC™, a direct synthesis strategy delivered 86% HPLC purity, while a catch-lipidation-and-release approach achieved over 90% purity with >99% lipidation conversion.
PEC purification reduced solvent waste by over 70% compared to iterative preparative HPLC, extending the same engineering ingenuity into a greener end-to-end workflow.
This work was conducted in collaboration with Lorenzo Pacini, Anna Maria Papini, and Paolo Rovero of the Interdepartmental Research Unit of Peptide and Protein Chemistry and Biology, Department of Chemistry "Ugo Schiff", University of Florence, Florence, Italy.