Peptide research, regulation, discovery. Every story links to the peptide it’s about.
RSSGerman researchers rebuilt the cell-death protein BNIP3 into B-017, an antagonist peptide that kept the mitochondrial self-destruct switched off and reduced damage in the heart, brain, and liver of animals.
A single injection of MID-35, a mirror-image myostatin blocker, enlarged mouse leg muscle for three months. The fat-signal it leaned on to wake muscle stem cells rose in young and adult mice but never showed up in aged ones, the muscle a real drug would target.
A chimeric peptide stitches a glioblastoma-homing sequence to a 7-amino-acid fragment of the dengue virus, then carries gallium-67 or lutetium-177 across the blood-brain barrier. In cells and healthy mice it works, but brain uptake is low and no tumor has been treated yet.
A Nature Nanotechnology team used a modified bacterial pore to tell all 20 amino acids apart, read peptides up to 39 residues long, and reconstruct a peptide's sequence from overlapping fragments at up to 97.4 percent accuracy, clearing the obstacle that has kept protein nanopore sequencing stuck for years.
Using AlphaFold, researchers reconstructed two domains of the WNT7B protein into a small peptide that rebuilt bone in aged mice and pigs, through a pathway that sidesteps the cancer risk of full WNT signaling.
Chemists turned the gut hormone behind Ozempic into a delivery address. A stapled GLP-1 analogue, clipped to a BRD4 degrader, wiped out the target protein only in cells carrying the GLP-1 receptor. The hormone was the van, not the medicine.
Christian Heinis's lab built a library of 15,360 random cyclic peptides, made the whole set small and greasy enough to pass a cell membrane, then screened for the rare crossers before asking what they bound. The lead, peptide 30 at 890.6 daltons, blocked the intracellular Keap1-Nrf2 interaction inside living cells. The membrane is the wall that keeps most peptide drugs as injections aimed at surface receptors, and a reliable way through it changes which targets are worth a peptide program at all.
Exendin-4, the peptide behind the diabetes drug exenatide, kept photoreceptors alive in two models of atrophic macular degeneration by reinstating GLP-1R/PKA/CREB1 signaling. Silencing the receptor, blocking PKA, or blocking CREB1 each abolished the rescue.
A new PLOS Pathogens paper screens a porcine cell library against Seneca Valley Virus 3C protease and lands a substrate-competitive decapeptide, P5, that hydrogen-bonds the catalytic His48, prevents 3C from cleaving cGAS, gasdermin A and pro-IL-1 beta, and restores cGAS-DNA phase separation along with downstream type I interferon signaling.
Rats given an anti-CGRP migraine antibody fifteen minutes before a subarachnoid hemorrhage had higher cerebral blood flow at five minutes and better motor recovery at forty-eight hours. By two weeks, survival and composite neurology had converged. Early benefit, late wash.
A new ODAST study built a lysine-centered branched peptidomimetic against TNF-alpha and ran it through three iterative rounds (charge identity, charge density, aromatic and hydrogen bonding), arriving at a bidentate anionic recognition motif that bound the cytokine more than ten times tighter than the parent scaffold and blocked TNF-alpha-induced cytotoxicity in cells at low-micromolar IC50.
A Chilean group designed peptides from both sides of the TRPM4-KCTD5 interface, showed they disrupt the complex in cells, drop channel currents, and reduce MDA-MB-231 invasion. The route to the ion channel was through its accessory protein.
A research group screened peptides from the edible morel mushroom Morchella importuna, pulled out MIP-8, and showed it kept Parkinson's-model neurons alive by reactivating the PI3K-AKT-mTOR pathway. An AKT inhibitor abolished the rescue.
F11R, the gene that codes for JAM-A and sits on the chromosome 1q lesion that just got pushed into the 2025 high-risk multiple myeloma cytogenetic update, has a structure-designed peptide that disrupts its homodimer. Candidate P4 reduced proliferation, induced senescence, and shrank CD138-positive plasmacytomas in a chick chorioallantoic membrane xenograft.
MHP1-AcN, a RANKL-derived peptide first developed for bone biology, binds LGR4 directly and displaces the IQGAP1 scaffold that R-spondin-3 needs to potentiate Wnt signaling. In Anticancer Research, daily intraperitoneal dosing shrank A549 lung adenocarcinoma xenografts in BALB/c nude mice and reduced LRP6 phosphorylation, beta-catenin accumulation, and migration in dish.