Where we came from - our foundations
Triple Helical Peptides arose from Dr Michael Barnes' research at the Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge in the 1980s.
Michael used manual peptide synthesis to make fragments of collagen that bound to or activated platelets. He moved to Dr Richard Farndale's group in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, and Dr Graham Knight, working with Michael and Richard, contributed automated peptide synthesis to produce collagen-like peptides. They published Collagen-Related Peptide (CRP) in 1995, and began to collaborate with other labs, leading to the identification of GPVI as a key activatory collagen receptor on the platelet surface in 1998 and providing a specific ligand to probe the detail of the collagen signalling pathway in platelets. Upon Michael's retirement in 1999, Richard developed the production of CRP-XL, and began to distribute it worldwide, with grant support from British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.
"Richard developed the production of CRP-XL, and began to distribute it worldwide, with grant support from British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust"
The recruitment of Dr Nico Raynal allowed the development of the first Collagen Toolkit,
a set of overlapping THPs that covered the whole triple-helical domain of Collagen III. This allowed the mapping and identification of many interesting sites along the collagen molecule, including those that bound integrins, GPVI and VWF A3. Collagen Toolkit II soon followed, and the synthesis activity was taken up by Dr Dominique Bihan, Dr Jean-Daniel Malcor and later by Dr Arkadiusz Bonna, then Assistant Professor in the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Science.
