Peptide Synthesis Industry: Market & Technology Trends

An Industry Under Pressure to Scale
Market Size and Growth Projections
SPPS: The Workhorse Gets an Upgrade
Continuous Flow Synthesis: From Batch to Stream
Green Chemistry: Cleaning Up Peptide Manufacturing
The CDMO Boom: Who Is Building What
Regional Dynamics: Where the Capacity Is Going
Cost Reduction Trends
The GLP-1 Effect on Manufacturing
Emerging Technologies on the Horizon
FAQ
The Bottom Line
References

An Industry Under Pressure to Scale

The peptide synthesis industry has a scaling problem — and the pharmaceutical market is forcing it to solve that problem fast.

For most of its history, peptide manufacturing served a niche market. Therapeutic peptides were specialty drugs prescribed to relatively small patient populations: growth hormone deficiency, fertility treatments, rare endocrine disorders. The manufacturing infrastructure was built accordingly — modest batch sizes, specialized facilities, premium pricing per gram.

Then GLP-1 drugs happened.

When semaglutide and tirzepatide became blockbuster treatments for obesity and diabetes — with a combined addressable population of hundreds of millions of people — the demand for peptide active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) exploded beyond anything the existing manufacturing infrastructure could handle. The drug shortages that prompted emergency compounding allowances were, at their core, manufacturing shortages.

The industry's response has been a wave of investment unlike anything in peptide manufacturing history: billions of dollars in new facilities, expanded reactor capacity, and technology upgrades. Understanding these trends matters because manufacturing capacity — or the lack of it — directly determines which patients can access these drugs and at what cost.

Market Size and Growth Projections

The peptide synthesis market sits at an inflection point. Depending on the source and scope of measurement, current estimates range from $800 million to $1.01 billion in 2026, with projections reaching $1.37–$1.64 billion by the early 2030s.

A February 2026 market report estimated the market at $1.01 billion in 2026, growing at a 6.27% CAGR to $1.37 billion by 2031. Fortune Business Insights projects a more aggressive trajectory: $800.16 million in 2026 growing to $1.64 billion by 2034 at a 9.39% CAGR.

The chemical synthesis peptide drugs market — a broader measure that includes finished dosage forms — is projected to reach $4.82 billion by 2034, growing at a 6.54% CAGR.

The GLP-1-specific CDMO market is growing even faster: 12.7% CAGR through 2034, reflecting the outsized demand from obesity and diabetes drugs.

What unites these projections is directionality: the peptide synthesis industry is growing substantially faster than the broader pharmaceutical manufacturing sector, driven by the convergence of GLP-1 demand, oncology peptide development, and an expanding pipeline of peptide-drug conjugates and next-generation multi-agonists.

SPPS: The Workhorse Gets an Upgrade

Solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS), the method Robert Bruce Merrifield invented in 1963 (earning a Nobel Prize in 1984), remains the dominant manufacturing technology for therapeutic peptides. The basic principle hasn't changed: amino acids are added one at a time to a growing peptide chain attached to an insoluble resin support. What has changed is the speed, scale, and efficiency.

Microwave-Assisted SPPS

Microwave-assisted synthesis has compressed reaction times from hours to minutes per coupling step while lifting crude purities above 90%. The energy input from microwave radiation accelerates the coupling reaction kinetics, reduces side reactions that occur during long reaction times, and enables more complete coupling at each step — meaning fewer impurities in the final product.

Modern SPPS platforms now combine microwave heating with automated reagent delivery and real-time monitoring, creating systems that can synthesize peptides of 30–50 amino acids with crude purities that would have been considered impossible a decade ago.

Scale-Up Challenges

The peptide synthesis market for SPPS is projected to advance at a 5.71% CAGR through 2031 as manufacturers retrofit older instruments with microwave reactors. But scaling SPPS from laboratory (milligram) to commercial (multi-kilogram) quantities presents specific challenges:

Resin loading. At large scale, ensuring uniform distribution of growing peptide chains across kilograms of resin is non-trivial. Channeling (where solvent flows preferentially through certain paths in the resin bed) reduces coupling efficiency.

Solvent consumption. SPPS is solvent-intensive. Each coupling and deprotection step requires multiple wash cycles. A single kilogram-scale synthesis can consume thousands of liters of solvents like dimethylformamide (DMF) and dichloromethane (DCM) — both expensive and environmentally problematic.

Purification bottleneck. Crude peptide from SPPS must be cleaved from the resin and purified, typically by reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC). At commercial scale, purification often becomes the rate-limiting step, requiring large HPLC columns and consuming significant volumes of acetonitrile.

Beyond Traditional SPPS

The market is expanding into more complex peptide formats: cyclic peptides, stapled peptides, and peptide-drug conjugates. These structures require additional synthetic steps — macrolactamization, hydrocarbon stapling, or conjugation chemistry — that add cost and complexity to the SPPS workflow.

The need for metal-free chemical components, advanced photolabile linkers, and automated reactors is driving a technology upgrade cycle across the industry. However, analysts project that the convergence of digital design, flow technology, and biocatalysis could begin to erode SPPS dominance beyond 2030.

Continuous Flow Synthesis: From Batch to Stream

Continuous flow peptide synthesis represents the most significant manufacturing paradigm shift since SPPS itself.

How It Works

Instead of building a peptide on a resin in a batch reactor, flow synthesis pumps reagents through a series of reactors in a continuous stream. Each reactor performs a specific step — coupling, deprotection, washing — and the growing peptide moves through the system in real time.

The advantages are substantial:

Speed. Flow reactors enable much faster heating and cooling cycles than batch reactors, compressing individual step times from minutes to seconds in some implementations.

Consistency. Continuous processes eliminate batch-to-batch variability because every molecule experiences identical reaction conditions as it moves through the system.

Real-time analytics. Inline analytical tools (IR spectroscopy, UV monitoring) can detect incomplete reactions in real time, enabling immediate process adjustments rather than discovering quality problems after synthesis is complete.

Reduced solvent use. Flow systems can use solvents more efficiently, with tighter control over wash volumes and the potential for inline solvent recycling.

Current Limitations

Flow peptide synthesis has not yet displaced batch SPPS at large commercial scale, for several reasons. The equipment is expensive and specialized. The chemistry for certain difficult couplings (aggregation-prone sequences, sterically hindered amino acids) is less mature in flow mode. And regulatory agencies require extensive process validation for any manufacturing change, creating inertia that favors established batch processes.

That said, the technology is maturing rapidly. Automation, microwave-assisted SPPS, continuous-flow reactors, and real-time analytics are being combined into integrated manufacturing platforms that compress cycle times from hours to minutes while producing crude purities above 90%.

Green Chemistry: Cleaning Up Peptide Manufacturing

Peptide synthesis has an environmental problem. Traditional SPPS uses large volumes of toxic organic solvents, generates significant chemical waste, and consumes substantial energy. As regulatory expectations tighten and corporate sustainability commitments become material business considerations, green chemistry has moved from a nice-to-have to a competitive necessity.

Solvent Recovery and Recycling

Acetonitrile — the primary solvent used in peptide purification (HPLC) — is expensive and energy-intensive to produce. In May 2025, a manufacturing facility in California piloted a solvent-recovery system for acetonitrile in peptide purification, enabling recycling of solvent and reducing waste generation. If this approach scales successfully, it could significantly reduce both the environmental footprint and the cost of peptide purification.

DMF — the workhorse solvent for SPPS — is classified as a substance of very high concern (SVHC) under European REACH regulations. Companies are developing replacement solvents (dimethyl sulfoxide, gamma-valerolactone, and proprietary "green" solvents) that maintain coupling efficiency while meeting tighter regulatory requirements.

European Leadership

Europe has been at the forefront of green chemistry for peptide manufacturing, driven by stricter environmental regulations and sustained investment in sustainable manufacturing processes. The emphasis spans solvent reduction, waste minimization, energy-efficient heating (microwave over thermal), and biodegradable protecting groups.

Europe is projected to register the fastest growth in peptide synthesis over the 2026–2035 period, reinforced by investments in automated SPPS, greener chemistries, and advanced GMP manufacturing infrastructure.

Biocatalysis

Enzymatic peptide synthesis — using proteases and other enzymes to form peptide bonds under mild aqueous conditions — represents the greenest possible approach. While current enzyme-based methods can't yet match SPPS for long peptides or complex sequences, they are increasingly viable for shorter peptides and specific coupling steps. The combination of chemoenzymatic approaches (using enzymes for certain steps within an otherwise chemical synthesis) is an active area of development.

The CDMO Boom: Who Is Building What

Contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) are where the industry's growth is most visible. The CDMO segment is projected to grow at 11.62% CAGR during the forecast period — roughly double the overall peptide synthesis market growth rate.

The reason is structural: pharmaceutical companies increasingly prefer to outsource peptide manufacturing to specialized CDMOs rather than build internal capacity. The technical expertise required, the capital investment, and the regulatory complexity all favor outsourcing to organizations that can amortize these costs across multiple clients.

CordenPharma: The Largest Bet

CordenPharma has committed over EUR 1 billion ($1.1 billion) to peptide platform expansion — the largest single investment in peptide manufacturing history.

Switzerland (Muttenz, near Basel). A $541 million greenfield facility with multiple production lines featuring SPPS reactors exceeding 5,000 liters for both GLP-1 and non-GLP-1 peptide projects. Construction and qualification phase: 2025–2027. Commercial operations: first half 2028. Expected to create over 300 local jobs.

Colorado, USA. More than $500 million in additional large-scale capacity, including new production areas exceeding 6,000 square meters of usable space. The expansion more than doubles existing SPPS reactor capacity — adding 25,000 liters for a total exceeding 42,000 liters by 2028. Main construction started late 2024, with commercial activities targeted between late 2026 and early 2028.

Frankfurt, Germany. Received GMP certification in January 2025 for early- to mid-stage clinical peptide manufacturing.

These investments are backed by multi-year customer contracts totaling more than EUR 4 billion ($4.4 billion) in sales volume — an extraordinary level of demand certainty that reflects the long-term confidence pharmaceutical companies have in the peptide market.

Bachem: Swiss Precision at Scale

Bachem, one of the oldest and most established peptide CDMOs, is expanding on multiple fronts. The company is advancing expansion at its Bubendorf, Switzerland headquarters and planning an additional site at Sisslerfeld in the Swiss municipality of Eiken.

In the United States, Bachem acquired property adjacent to its Vista, California facility and plans to invest approximately $250 million between 2026 and 2030 to expand Vista capacity and modernize its Torrance, California facility.

PolyPeptide Group: Doubling Malmö

PolyPeptide Group, with facilities across Europe, the US, and India, announced the doubling of SPPS capacity at its Malmö, Sweden site in 2025 — reinforcing its position as a high-volume supplier to global pharmaceutical companies.

New Entrants and Expansions

The investment wave extends beyond the established leaders:

Cambrex Corporation announced a $120 million investment in expanding peptide manufacturing capabilities in the United States.

SK pharmteco invested $6.1 million at its Rancho Cordova facility for a new lab and cGMP kilo-scale facility for SPPS and purification.

Axplora committed EUR 50 million at its Mourenx, France site for large-scale HPLC and continuous chromatography, with first GLP-1 supply expected in 2026.

Granules India acquired Senn Chemicals AG in February 2025 to expand its peptide therapeutics and CDMO capabilities — a deal that illustrates the global nature of the capacity race.

For a broader look at the companies driving this expansion, see our top peptide companies to watch.

Regional Dynamics: Where the Capacity Is Going

North America

North America accounted for 40.12% of the peptide synthesis market in 2025, anchored by the United States' pharmaceutical ecosystem. More than $200 billion in drug R&D spending flowed through the region in 2025, with a growing share earmarked for peptide modalities. Major expansion projects from CordenPharma (Colorado), Bachem (California), and Cambrex are reinforcing North America's manufacturing base.

Europe

Germany, Switzerland, and the Nordics represent the core of European peptide manufacturing. Germany's established chemicals and pharmaceutical infrastructure provides a strong foundation, while Switzerland — which attracted CHF 2.7 billion in biotech investment in 2024 alone — is emerging as a global hub for peptide API production. CordenPharma's Swiss greenfield project and Bachem's Sisslerfeld plans concentrate substantial new capacity in the Basel region.

Europe's regulatory environment, with its emphasis on green chemistry and GMP compliance, is pushing the technological frontier. Companies investing in European facilities are building to the highest environmental and quality standards, which can serve as competitive advantages in global markets.

Asia-Pacific

Asia-Pacific shows the fastest growth trajectory, driven by expanding contract manufacturing capabilities and increasing biosimilar peptide production. India leads country-level growth through its expanding biopharma manufacturing infrastructure and peptide CDMO development. China follows with automation investments and a growing domestic GLP-1 pipeline.

South Korea is deploying $260 million for a new SK pharmteco facility slated to open in 2026, targeting GLP-1 and oncology peptide capacity. The region's cost advantages, combined with improving quality standards, position Asia-Pacific as an increasingly competitive manufacturing base.

Cost Reduction Trends

The economics of peptide synthesis are improving along several vectors.

Economies of Scale

The sheer volume of GLP-1 demand has driven facilities to scales that were unthinkable a decade ago. CordenPharma's planned 42,000+ liters of SPPS reactor capacity at a single US site represents a concentration of manufacturing power that enables significant per-unit cost reductions through volume.

Larger batch sizes spread fixed costs (facility overhead, quality systems, regulatory compliance) across more product. And purpose-built GLP-1 facilities can optimize every aspect of the process — from raw material handling to purification — for a specific peptide sequence, eliminating the flexibility-related inefficiencies of multi-product facilities.

Automation

Automated synthesizers reduce labor costs and human error. Modern systems can execute an entire SPPS run — including amino acid weighing, coupling, deprotection, washing, cleavage, and initial purification — with minimal human intervention. The resulting consistency also reduces waste from failed batches.

Process Intensification

Microwave-assisted SPPS, continuous flow synthesis, and inline analytics are all forms of process intensification — doing more in less time and space. A reactor that produces the same output in half the time effectively doubles capacity without new capital investment.

Raw Material Costs

Protected amino acids — the building blocks of SPPS — represent a significant portion of peptide API cost. As demand scales and suppliers compete, amino acid prices are declining. The growth of Asian amino acid producers, particularly in China and India, has introduced price competition into a market that was historically dominated by European and Japanese suppliers.

The GLP-1 Effect on Manufacturing

The GLP-1 class has had an outsized effect on the peptide synthesis industry for a simple reason: these drugs serve enormous patient populations at doses that require substantial API quantities.

Consider the math for oral semaglutide. The Wegovy pill contains 25 mg of semaglutide per tablet, taken daily. That is 9.1 grams of semaglutide API per patient per year. If 10 million patients use oral semaglutide, the annual API demand is 91 metric tons. For a peptide of semaglutide's complexity (31 amino acids), producing 91 metric tons per year requires manufacturing capacity that simply didn't exist before the current investment cycle.

Injectable semaglutide requires less API per patient (2.4 mg weekly, roughly 125 mg/year), but serves a larger current patient base. Tirzepatide, retatrutide, and other pipeline drugs add further demand.

The result is a manufacturing arms race. CDMOs that secure multi-year supply contracts with Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and other GLP-1 developers are investing billions in dedicated capacity. Those that miss out risk being marginalized as the market consolidates around a smaller number of large-scale producers.

This dynamic also shapes the market for non-GLP-1 peptides. The capacity expansions driven by GLP-1 demand will, over time, create available capacity for other therapeutic peptides — oncology peptide-drug conjugates, antimicrobial peptides, and next-generation metabolic drugs. The GLP-1 surge is, in effect, building the manufacturing infrastructure that the broader peptide therapeutics industry will use for the next two decades.

For context on the market forces driving this expansion, see our peptide therapeutics market forecast.

Emerging Technologies on the Horizon

Several technologies could reshape peptide manufacturing beyond the current decade.

AI-Driven Process Optimization

Machine learning models trained on synthesis data can predict optimal reaction conditions for new peptide sequences, reducing the empirical trial-and-error that currently characterizes process development. Companies are integrating AI into everything from solvent selection to purification method development. For more on AI's role, see our AI in peptide discovery analysis.

Native Chemical Ligation and Expressed Protein Ligation

For very long peptides (>50 amino acids), SPPS becomes increasingly inefficient. Native chemical ligation — joining two or more synthetic peptide fragments through a chemoselective reaction — enables the production of long peptides and small proteins that would be impractical to synthesize as a single chain. This hybrid approach is gaining traction for complex therapeutic peptides and protein-peptide hybrid drugs.

Recombinant Peptide Production

Producing peptides in engineered bacteria or yeast (recombinant expression) offers an alternative to chemical synthesis for certain sequences. Recombinant production can be more cost-effective for very long peptides produced at large scale, and it avoids the organic solvent waste associated with SPPS. The trade-off is less flexibility in incorporating non-natural amino acids and post-translational modifications.

Solid-Phase Fragment Condensation

A hybrid approach that synthesizes peptide fragments individually on solid phase, then condenses them in solution. This method combines the efficiency of SPPS for short fragments with the scalability of solution-phase chemistry for final assembly.

FAQ

How are therapeutic peptides manufactured?

Most therapeutic peptides are manufactured using solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS), where amino acids are added one at a time to a growing peptide chain on a resin support. After synthesis, the peptide is cleaved from the resin and purified by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The entire process is conducted under GMP (good manufacturing practice) conditions in specialized facilities.

Why is there a shortage of GLP-1 drugs?

GLP-1 drug shortages resulted from unprecedented demand growth that outpaced manufacturing capacity. Producing peptide APIs at the scale needed for drugs prescribed to tens of millions of patients requires specialized facilities with large SPPS reactors and purification systems. CDMOs and drug manufacturers are investing billions in capacity expansion, but new facilities take 2–4 years to build and qualify.

What is a CDMO, and why do they matter for peptides?

A CDMO (contract development and manufacturing organization) is a company that develops manufacturing processes and produces drugs under contract for pharmaceutical companies. CDMOs matter for peptides because peptide synthesis requires specialized expertise, equipment, and facilities that many pharmaceutical companies prefer to outsource rather than build internally. The CDMO segment is the fastest-growing part of the peptide synthesis market.

How is green chemistry changing peptide manufacturing?

Green chemistry initiatives in peptide manufacturing focus on reducing toxic solvent use (particularly DMF and DCM), implementing solvent recycling systems (especially for acetonitrile in purification), using enzymatic catalysis for certain synthesis steps, and developing biodegradable protecting groups. European regulations are driving much of this innovation, and companies that invest in greener processes gain both regulatory and cost advantages.

How much does it cost to manufacture a peptide drug?

Manufacturing costs vary enormously depending on peptide length, complexity, scale, and purity requirements. A simple 10-amino-acid peptide at kilogram scale might cost hundreds of dollars per gram, while a complex 40-amino-acid peptide with post-translational modifications could cost thousands per gram at small scale. Economies of scale are significant — the per-gram cost drops substantially as production volumes increase. The GLP-1 manufacturing build-out is driving costs down across the industry.

What is continuous flow peptide synthesis?

Continuous flow synthesis pumps reagents through a series of reactors in a continuous stream, as opposed to traditional batch SPPS where reactions occur in a single vessel. Flow synthesis offers faster reaction times, better consistency, real-time quality monitoring, and reduced solvent use. While not yet dominant at commercial scale, the technology is maturing rapidly and is expected to become increasingly important for large-scale peptide production.

The Bottom Line

The peptide synthesis industry is in the middle of its biggest transformation since Merrifield invented solid-phase synthesis six decades ago. GLP-1 demand has forced an industry built for specialty drugs to scale toward commodity-level production volumes. Billions of dollars in CDMO investments — led by CordenPharma's EUR 1+ billion platform expansion — are reshaping the manufacturing base.

The technology is evolving in parallel. Microwave-assisted SPPS, continuous flow synthesis, green chemistry, and AI-driven process optimization are collectively reducing costs, improving quality, and shrinking the environmental footprint of peptide production. These advances matter not just for today's GLP-1 blockbusters, but for the next generation of peptide therapeutics in oncology, anti-infectives, and metabolic disease.

The bottleneck is time. New facilities take years to build and qualify. The current investment cycle won't deliver its full capacity until 2027–2028. In the interim, peptide API availability will remain a constraint on drug supply and a factor in pricing. The companies that solved the manufacturing problem first — or contracted with CDMOs that solved it — will have a durable competitive advantage in one of pharmaceutical history's fastest-growing markets.

References

Peptide synthesis market research report 2026. GlobeNewsWire (2026). https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/02/09/3234673/28124/en/Peptide-Synthesis-Market-Research-Report-2026-Automated-Technologies-and-CDMO-Expansion-Drive-Growth-Forecast-to-2031.html
Chemical synthesis peptide drugs market. GlobeNewsWire (2025). https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/12/16/3206382/0/en/Chemical-Synthesis-Peptide-Drugs-Market-Set-to-Reach-USD-4-82-Billion-by-2034-Growing-at-a-6-54-CAGR-Driven-by-Automation-and-Green-Chemistry-Advances.html
Peptide synthesis market size and share. Fortune Business Insights. https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/peptide-synthesis-market-114373
CordenPharma EUR 900 million peptide platform expansion. https://cordenpharma.com/articles/cordenpharma-initiates-record-900-million-euro-investment-in-peptide-platform-expansion-and-consortium-enters-pandemic-preparedness/
CordenPharma Swiss greenfield facility. https://cordenpharma.com/articles/press-release-cordenpharma-expands-peptide-platform-with-more-than-500-million-euro-greenfield-facility-construction-near-basel-switzerland/
CDMO/CMO expansion update: Riding the strength of TIDES. DCAT Value Chain Insights. https://www.dcatvci.org/features/cdmo-cmo-expansion-update-riding-the-strength-of-tides/
CDMOs/CMOs: The movers and shakers of 2025. DCAT Value Chain Insights. https://www.dcatvci.org/features/cdmos-cmos-the-movers-and-shakers-of-2025/
GLP-1 peptide synthesis CDMO market insights. InsightAce Analytic. https://www.insightaceanalytic.com/report/glp-1-peptide-synthesis-cdmo-market/3105
GMP peptides market growth outlook. Towards Healthcare. https://www.towardshealthcare.com/insights/gmp-peptides-market-sizing
CordenPharma GLP-1 manufacturing investment. Fierce Pharma. https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/german-cdmo-cordenpharma-invests-981m-bolster-glp-1-manufacturing
CordenPharma Swiss expansion. BioProcess International. https://www.bioprocessintl.com/facilities-capacity/cordenpharma-bolsters-glp-1-production-with-540m-swiss-expansion
Peptide CDMO market insights 2025–2032. Congruence Market Insights. https://www.congruencemarketinsights.com/report/peptide-cdmo-market
Global peptide synthesis market outlook 2026–2036. OpenPR. https://www.openpr.com/news/4322643/global-peptide-synthesis-market-outlook-2026-2036-strategic

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