Peptide research, regulation, discovery. Every story links to the peptide it’s about.
RSSChemists 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.
HRS-7535, a once-daily oral GLP-1 pill, cut body weight up to 9.4 percent over 26 weeks in a 235-person Chinese Phase 2 trial. But the 120 mg dose lost less than the 60 mg dose, and the lowest dose missed placebo entirely.
Lilly is paying up to 800 million dollars to put an undisclosed neurodegeneration molecule on BioArctic's transferrin-receptor BrainTransporter. The recurring buyer is the delivery system, not any one drug.
On June 19 Japan cleared Wegovy (semaglutide 2.4 mg) for fatty-liver disease with fibrosis, its first approved MASH treatment. The ESSENCE trial cleared inflammation in 62.9 percent of patients versus 34.3 on placebo.
A mitochondrial peptide marketed as an exercise mimic activated AMPK in worn-out human stem cells, then made them divide less, age faster, and fail to repair injured mouse kidneys. The authors call it a dissociation between metabolic activation and function.
A Swedish registry of 14,694 people found semaglutide linked to 21 percent fewer psychiatric hospitalizations during the months patients took it. Liraglutide and dulaglutide, which hit the same receptor, showed nothing. The authors say it is not a class effect.
EndoCyclic Therapeutics has FDA clearance to begin human testing of ENDO-205, a peptide it calls the first non-hormonal therapy designed to remove endometriosis lesions rather than suppress the symptoms they cause. Every drug approved for the disease today, from the Lupron peptide to newer GnRH-blocking pills, works by lowering estrogen and pushing the body toward a chemical menopause. ENDO-205's lesion-clearing data is still preclinical, the target undisclosed, and the human program at its earliest point, but the mechanism is the first real departure the field has had in years.
HLB Therapeutics says RGN-259, a thymosin beta-4 eye drop for neurotrophic keratitis, failed to beat placebo on complete corneal healing in its European SEER-3 Phase 3, with the company blaming a control arm that recovered better than expected. The same peptide is sold unregulated as TB-500 on a tissue-repair story it has rarely had to prove against a placebo. A second, identical US trial (SEER-2) reads out in the second half of 2026.
Wistar Institute researchers injected obese mice with a plasmid encoding cleavage-resistant GLP-1 and GIP analogues, then used AI-guided design to build a dual-agonist version. One dose drove durable weight loss.