Peptide research, regulation, discovery. Every story links to the peptide it’s about.
RSSA real-world analysis of nearly 878,000 people with obstructive sleep apnea tied GLP-1 drugs to fewer strokes, brain bleeds, and deaths. The protective signal weakened every year of follow-up, and the year-one mortality drop is large enough to flag healthy-adherer bias.
The FDA cleared a single-patient compassionate-use request for Eli Lilly's unapproved triple agonist retatrutide. Eighteen bioethicists and obesity clinicians told STAT the one-person route is the wrong tool for a disease that affects 100 million Americans, when the standard path to the drug is still a clinical trial.
A Diabetologia study using human donor islets and mouse genetics finds liraglutide's push on insulin runs mostly through a hypothalamic brain gate in healthy bodies, then hands off to a direct pancreatic route as metabolic disease sets in. It is a mechanism for the variability clinicians already see.
The Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee meets July 23 and 24 to decide whether BPC-157, TB-500, MOTS-c, KPV, DSIP, Semax, and Epitalon belong on the 503A list that makes a peptide legal to compound. The seven are voted as one bucket, but their evidence bases are nothing alike.
A meta-analysis of eight cardiovascular trials and 70,822 patients found GLP-1 drugs cut major heart events by 17 percent whether kidney function was normal or reduced. Because reduced-kidney patients have more events to start with, the same cut prevented more: 39 treated to stop one event versus 62.
A records study of nearly 877,000 type 2 diabetes patients found GLP-1 users had a 48 percent higher rate of new smell or taste problems. Smell took the bigger hit, an 81 percent jump, and the signal held across two years.
NK2R both curbs appetite and raises energy expenditure, the thing GLP-1 drugs barely do. A new Nature Structural and Molecular Biology paper maps the selectivity a clean NK2R drug needs, since the natural ligand also fires sister receptors that cause side effects.
A 352-patient analysis found only 10 to 20 percent of personalized cancer-vaccine peptides trigger an immune response, and what predicts the winners is hydrophobicity and HLA binding, not which mutation was chosen.
Chemists built 14 ring-shaped peptides from a melanotan II scaffold and found that ring size alone steers them toward blocking or activating MC4R, the brain's appetite receptor, while ignoring its three close cousins. It is a recipe for selectivity the broad melanocortin drugs never had.
Eli Lilly is cutting its 2.3 billion euro Alzey injectable site in half and dropping 1,000 planned jobs to 500, blaming Germany's proposed drug-price reform. The redirected capacity is heading to the United States, and Boehringer is pulling back too.
A meta-analysis of 11 trials and 25,067 people pooled semaglutide's reduction in major cardiovascular events at 32 percent, and the result held when the obesity and heart-failure trials were removed. The same pooling quantified the costs: more than double the gallbladder events and gut-driven dropouts.
Elicio's ELI-002 7P peptide vaccine did not beat observation on disease-free survival across all 144 pancreatic-cancer patients. But the vaccine arm carried nearly twice the share of harder-to-treat cases, and in the cleanly resected majority the shot nearly doubled median time to recurrence.
At one urban clinic, patients on semaglutide lost 6.5 percent of their body weight over a year against 1.1 percent on dulaglutide, and were close to four times as likely to lose 10 percent or more. The patient group was predominantly African American, a population the trials that defined these drugs barely included.
A meta-analysis of seven randomized trials found GLP-1 drugs added about five kilograms of weight loss six months after bariatric surgery, but the benefit was no longer statistically reliable at a year. And every trial tested liraglutide, not the stronger drugs people actually use now.
The TGA made unapproved peptides a 2026 compliance priority and named five: BPC-157, GHK-Cu, TB-500, CJC-1295, and retatrutide. Four have thin human evidence. The fifth is Lilly's Phase 3 obesity drug, swept up because demand outran approval.