News and Press

By Drug Development & Delivery | March/April The modern therapeutic toolbox has been dominated by two poles. Small molecules excel at oral dosing, distribution, and manufacturing, and they are superb when a target exposes deep, well defined pockets. Yet their very compactness, typically <600 Daltons, constrains the surface area they can contact, making it difficult

By Karsten Eastman | Feb 12, 2026 Generative AI has already changed what is possible in protein engineering. In the last few years, the field has moved from predicting protein structures to proposing entirely new proteins, often with experimentally verified folding and binding, at a pace that was unrealistic a decade ago. Much of that

By Pharma’s Almanac | February 2, 2026 Over the next decade, AI will continue to play an important and expanding role in biopharma, particularly in data integration, target identification, and optimization within well-charted chemical and biological spaces. That said, there remains a fundamental limitation: AI systems can only extrapolate from what has already been observed.

By Pharmaceutical Technology | January 20, 2026 Dr Karsten Eastman, CEO, Sethera Therapeutics, highlights the challenges around ‘true’ diversification in DNA libraries. In drug discovery, big numbers for screening campaigns are loved. Trillions of molecules! 1020‑member libraries! But there is a very real question to ask: how many distinct molecules can actually fit in a

By Karsten Eastman | January 19, 2026 Enzymes once viewed as rigid specialists are now being repurposed as modular tools, revealing latent chemical capabilities and enabling new approaches to molecule construction. Decades of enzymological research framed active sites as fussy and narrowly tuned, built to recognize one substrate and do one job. New research is

By Drug Target Review | 20 October 2025 Researchers have discovered an enzyme, PapB, that can ‘tie off’ therapeutic peptides into stable rings, which could help improve GLP-1 drugs for diabetes and obesity – making them more effective and longer lasting. Read full article here

PapB ‘ties off’ peptides, paving way for stronger, longer-lasting versions of medications used to treat obesity and diabetes. Chemistry researchers at the University of Utah have uncovered an enzyme, dubbed PapB, that can “tie off” therapeutic peptides—protein-like drugs—into tight rings, a process known as macrocyclization. This enzymatic trick could help drug developers make stronger, longer-lasting

GLP-1–pathway agonists such as semaglutide and newer multi-agonists have transformed care for obesity and diabetes, yet developers still wrestle with durability, tissue targeting, and signal “bias.” Macrocyclization, tying part of a peptide into a ring, can shield drugs from degradation and favor bioactive shapes, but conventional chemistry can be costly and hard to apply late

SALT LAKE CITY, UT, UNITED STATES, September 25, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ — Sethera Therapeutics, a biotechnology company advancing next-generation polymacrocyclic peptide therapeutics, today announced the appointment of two globally recognized scientists, Jeffery W. Kelly, PhD (Scripps Research), and Alexander M. Klibanov, PhD (MIT), to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). They join existing SAB member Dr. Robert Langer

Scientists from the University of Utah collaborated with the Utah-based Sethera Therapeutics to develop an “unexpected” enzymatic approach to therapeutic peptide design. The research team published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Lead author Karsten Eastman and his colleagues describe how PapB – a naturally-occurring enzyme found in Paenibacillus polymyxa