Antibodies are proteins produced by the human body to fight foreign microorganisms which can cause disease and infection. Peptides are made up of amino acids and are smaller than regular proteins.
They are often used to study the structure of other proteins and also create new antibodies.
Phage display is a technique by which a bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria, is used to produce new proteins. Antibodies produced by this method have been used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel diseases, autoimmune diseases and even metastatic cancer. Smith, who was the first to develop phage display in 1985, is currently at the University of Missouri in the US and Winter, who used it for the directed evolution of antibodies, works at the MRC laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom (UK).