Oral delivery of peptide therapeutics through whole GI tissue high-throughput screening
Thomas Von Erlach
CSO, Vivtex
Despite decades of research, most peptide therapeutics require needle administration due to insufficient oral bioavailability limiting their application and utility as a therapeutic modality. In recent years, there have been several exciting advancements in the field of oral peptide delivery providing renewed hope that peptide therapeutics could one day be administered orally, beyond a limited set of isolated examples. In this presentation I will cover recent innovations in the field with a specific focus on high throughput oral peptide drug delivery screening for oral bioavailability enhancement.
Dr. von Erlach co-founded Vivtex and joined as its Chief Scientific Officer when Vivtex was formed as a MIT spin-off in 2018. Prior to that he led the interdisciplinary efforts around gastrointestinal model systems for oral drug delivery applications in the Laboratory of Prof. Robert Langer and Prof. Giovanni Traverso, at MIT. Thomas obtained a PhD from Imperial College London in Bioengineering and BSc and MSc in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from ETH in Switzerland. His research interests include advanced in vitro model systems for drug development, oral drug delivery and gastrointestinal pharmacology. His work is published in several high impact journals including Nature Materials, Nature Biomedical Engineering and Nature Communications.