Articles

How lipidation, PEGylation, Fc and albumin fusion, XTEN tails and protease-resistant substitutions turn a two-minute peptide into a once-weekly drug.

How peptides are cyclized, what closing the ring actually buys in stability and affinity, and why cyclization still almost never delivers an oral drug.

Neurotensin produces non-opioid analgesia and hypothermia in the brain, yet survives about ninety seconds in the body and cannot cross the blood-brain barrier.

Relaxin is a two-chain pregnancy hormone with powerful vascular and anti-fibrotic effects in the lab, and a clinical record of near-misses and outright failures.

Antimicrobial peptides are your body’s own antibiotics. How they work, why resistance still happens, and why almost none of them ever became drugs.

GLP-2 is cut from the same precursor as GLP-1 but does the opposite job: it grows the intestinal lining. Here is how it works and what the trials actually showed.

Motilin triggers the migrating motor complex that sweeps the gut while fasting, and rodents lost the gene entirely, which is why no motilin drug exists.

Vasoactive intestinal peptide relaxes smooth muscle and drives secretion, but it acts locally as a neurotransmitter rather than circulating as a hormone.

PYY is a gut hormone released after meals that reduces food intake in humans, yet after two decades of trials no PYY-based drug is approved anywhere.

PACAP is a neuropeptide named for what it did in a 1989 assay, and it is now the leading second peptide target in migraine after CGRP – with one result nobody predicted.