Category: Peptides
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Cyclodipeptides: From Their Green Synthesis to Anti-Age Activity
Cyclodipeptides (CDPs) or 2,5-diketopiperazines (DKPs) are naturally occurring biomolecules that have increasingly attracted researchers’ attention for a variety of reasons, as evident from the many recent reviews that cover aspects ranging from their sustainable production via enzymatic catalysis to all the possible methods for their preparation and self-assembly into gels and their biological activities, including…
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Novel branched amphiphilic peptides for nucleic acids delivery
Branched peptides are a new type of peptide-based nucleic acid delivery vectors. It has been reported that branched and dendrimeric cationic peptides have better transfection efficiencies than linear peptides due to their superior capacity for DNA condensation (Ageitos et al., 2015, Luo et al., 2011). Ageitos et al. synthesized linear cationic peptides and branched cationic peptide…
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SPARC: a key player in the pathologies associated with obesity and diabetes
SPARC (secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine, also known as osteonectin or BM-40) is a widely expressed profibrotic protein with pleiotropic roles, which have been studied in a variety of conditions. Notably, SPARC is linked to human obesity; SPARC derived from adipose tissue is associated with insulin resistance and secretion of SPARC by adipose…
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The Discovery and Development of Liraglutide and Semaglutide
The discovery of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), an incretin hormone with important effects on glycemic control and body weight regulation, led to efforts to extend its half-life and make it therapeutically effective in people with type 2 diabetes (T2D). The development of short- and then long-acting GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) followed. Our article charts the discovery…
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Design of a substrate-tailored peptiligase variant for the efficient synthesis of thymosin-α1
The manufacture of long peptides using conventional chemical strategies is still very challenging and the technology used has remained almost unchanged since Merrifield developed the solid phase approach in the 1960s. Solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) is characterized by an exponential decrease in the crude yield and purity as the peptide length increases: coupling and deprotection…
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Perspectives in Peptide-Based Vaccination Strategies
Peptide-Based Vaccines in Diseases An innovative approach is represented by peptide-based prototypes (Skwarczynski and Toth, 2016; Malonis et al., 2020) that are often able to overcome disadvantages encountered by other strategies as a more safe profile since for easiness of purification (Marasco et al., 2008; Marasco and Scognamiglio, 2015). Their chemical synthesis renders them suitable for large…
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Peptides as Pharmacological Carriers to the Brain: Promises, Shortcomings and Challenges
Central nervous system (CNS) diseases are among the most difficult to treat, mainly because the vast majority of the drugs fail to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) or to reach the brain at concentrations adequate to exert a pharmacological activity. The obstacle posed by the BBB has led to the in-depth study of strategies allowing…