Isca Biochemicals is based in Exeter and create custom peptides for pharmaceutical companies and universities across the world. Dr Cliff Rush is a Director and has been synthesising peptides since completing his PhD in Biochemistry at Exeter University in 1994. Isca has been operating since 2012, but Cliff has been commercially producing peptides in Exeter since 1995. As Cliff explains, “Peptides are employed by researchers in areas such as antibody production, receptor binding and as enzyme substrates. We have many years of experience offering our customers advice in peptide sequence design, for instance in helping to increase protease stability. We are able to synthesise these peptides to the required scale and purity in our lab, employing a mixture of solid-phase and solution-phase techniques.” Once a peptide has been synthesised by Cliff and his team, it’s freeze dried, and mailed out of Exeter to the customer. Despite working with international companies, Isca are keen to develop more local links to pharmaceutical and research companies in the South-West, “We already work with a few research groups locally, but we want to develop this – research groups will often use catalogue companies for their reagents, but by cutting out these companies, they can save money, and we can work directly with them to improve the reagents we supply.”
