The peptides could regulate all sorts of disease interactions that had previously been untouchable.
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The only problem, at first, was that the peptides only functioned in a test tube.
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Can the pathophysiology of autism be explained by the nature of the discovered urine peptides?
In hot springs and undersea vents, simple carbon compounds bubbled up to form amino acids and peptides.
The enzyme breaks up a virus's outer protein envelope into a mixture of mini-proteins known as peptides.
Drugmakers have tried to bottle their power, but the compounds, known as antimicrobial peptides, have proven to be poor drugs.
Most proteins are broken down into small peptides of between two and six amino acids or into single amino acids.
The peptides were not stable enough to be functional, and they often had difficulty getting to where they needed to go.
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Because of the peptides' high cost and unclear safety profile, "Big Pharma has abandoned them, " says Georgetown University researcher Michael Zasloff.
As a graduate student in chemistry, he worked on peptides, or molecules formed by the joining of two or more amino acids.
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EvoRx Technologies created a drug-delivery platform that makes peptides both stable and helps them go exactly where they need to go in the body.
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"In the case of the North American salamanders, what was found was that they have bacteria living on their skin that produce peptides that are lethal to the amphibian chytrid fungus, " says Dr Church.
In January last year he gave a lecture at the UCSD Cancer Center on "in vivo protein transduction, " a means to deliver biologically active molecules, such as therapeutic peptides and proteins, inside the cell.
However, in a case first brought before the courts in 1996, Integra claims that Merck infringed its patent on peptides by using them more widely than merely to assist in securing approval for a new medicine.
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