I checked with a close friend who's spent the last 30 years in research on new antibiotics. Regarding peptides, he says, it's well-known that they're effective, but they make poor "drugs if you define 'drug' as something that you can inject or put in your mouth, have it circulate through the body, arrive intact at the site of infection, and have an effect. They usually fall apart en route; they also often induce an allergic response when you inject them."
I'm no expert nor have I used any but I've read that some people snort them nasally like saline, on the r/peptides subreddit.
This might be my brain making things up but I think I've also heard of people taking them ocularly, putting a few drops in their eyes. I don't know where I would have read that though.
By hand a skilled practitioner of t-boc chemistry can couple one amino acid per hour, though t-boc (boc) is disfavored since workup involves using 100% HF. Fmoc is the more popular technique and it's more like two hours.
Robots can do this too, there's no real time benefit (but a robot can do more than 10 peptide couplings a day and doesn't need a lunch break -- though I guess neither does a grad student).
Chief problems include: you need super concentrated protected peptides, which are highly insoluble in just about any solvent, so your system needs to have tons of filters, plus stuff gunks up your apparatus over time anyways. Then, fmoc craps out at about 20 amino acids if you're lucky, due to exponential decay of yields (99%^20, not to mention later yields can be lower due to peptide chains curling on themselves), boc can go longer. Not to mention separating what you want away from side products gets difficult.
Finally the wastefulness: boc chemistry you're throwing away atoms almost 1:1 with what you're putting in to the peptide. Fmoc is typically 3:1. The solvents you use are these nasty greasy fishy smelling solvents (dmf, nmp). And the activating agents are really expensive compounds that you will slowly become allergic to if you keep working with peptides.
I personally have, though unpublished work, the first total (artificial) synthesis of ubiquitin, that I did as a grad student in my first year. Although it's 76 amino acids we synthesized it in two parts and stitched them together using a technique called "native chemical ligation", though we did something special called "folding-assisted native chemical ligation".
Our startup routinely orders the synthesis of hundreds of peptides for technology validation and drug discovery research (not suitable for human consumption). Costs for a small quantity through a contract research organizion can be $200-$2000 USD per peptide depending on desired purity, length, and chemical complexity. For some applications peptide arrays are suitable, and can drive the costs down to $10 USD per peptide or lower. In both cases, the turnaround time is 4-6 weeks, even though a peptide chemist could do the job in about half the time for a rush order.
It is a little known fact that peptides are becoming really big in the athletes/recovery/PED space. There is a lot they can do and there are so many. However we are also learning that they can cause a lot of unintended disease, cancer, etc as well.
> we are also learning that they can cause a lot of unintended disease, cancer, etc
From what I've read, as a layman, many peptides can increase cell growth which is sometimes associated with tumor growth, but they may also have a stabilizing effect on cell growth which wouldn't cause cancer at all, and could even be beneficial. I don't think there has been any evidenevidence linking peptides with cancer though. Would be eager to know if anyone has seen such evidence.
There is one thing that worries me about this. See humans and pathogens have a common interest. We don't want to be killed. And they don't want to kill us. So how can this be achieved? By using stronger defences in key parts of the body. Pathogens have no incentive to circumvent them, by respecting the boundaries they can infect and spread without killing with all of the issues that come with that. But if we take the best defences and apply them everywhere this balance could be permanently disrupted. Now whether this all applies to these peptides is an open question, but I hope they will consider risk/reward carefully.
We've eradicated diseases before and nothing happened (e.g. smallpox, polio). Also, the only risk is that the bacteria gain resistance to these peptides. Which isn't even that great of a risk - if humans express these peptides, we've been trying these antibiotics for millions of years. Clearly nothing bad happened.
Uh, is there any logical reason to think that the genome of a human - or any other higher level organism - has coded for unique antibiotic combinations that, e.g. various fungi which have spent the last billion years in daily fist fights with bacteria? I'm all for trawling the DNA of any creature for magical recipes, but our DNA has to code for a lot, and immune response is only a small part of it. Seems like it would be a lot more efficient to focus on phages or fungi and study what peptides they activate in response to specific bacteria, than just throwing endless processing cycles at the human genome hoping for, uh, grant money?
If we were just interested in bioprospecting for new antibiotics, sure, there's more phage genome out there than human. But there's a unique value in understanding how human antibiotic peptides work (or fail to work). Does expression of human antibiotic peptides decrease with age? Are they only expressed in certain tissues? There are important implications that we'll never uncover through non-human sequence mining. Additionally, human-derived peptides will probably have fewer side effects if used therapeutically, you never know what kind of immune response some random phage peptide will elicit.
I wish some money would be thrown at researching Kambo (an amazonian tree frog with a poisonous secretion used by a few indigenous tribes touted for its peptide cocktail, "the vaccine of the forest"), considering its growing use. Seems like a better place to start than some of these stabs in the dark.
[+] [-] hourislate|4 years ago|reply
There is evidence of BPC 157 can help heal IBS, etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5333585/
It has other healing properties related to ligament injuries.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21030672/
Another study on its benefits regarding blood vessels.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23782145/
An article from Ben Greenfield
https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/article/supplements-article...
A source for anyone interested.
https://infiniwell.com/products/bpc-157
[+] [-] gabll|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ternaryoperator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BizarroLand|4 years ago|reply
This might be my brain making things up but I think I've also heard of people taking them ocularly, putting a few drops in their eyes. I don't know where I would have read that though.
[+] [-] ackbar03|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnautics|4 years ago|reply
Robots can do this too, there's no real time benefit (but a robot can do more than 10 peptide couplings a day and doesn't need a lunch break -- though I guess neither does a grad student).
Chief problems include: you need super concentrated protected peptides, which are highly insoluble in just about any solvent, so your system needs to have tons of filters, plus stuff gunks up your apparatus over time anyways. Then, fmoc craps out at about 20 amino acids if you're lucky, due to exponential decay of yields (99%^20, not to mention later yields can be lower due to peptide chains curling on themselves), boc can go longer. Not to mention separating what you want away from side products gets difficult.
Finally the wastefulness: boc chemistry you're throwing away atoms almost 1:1 with what you're putting in to the peptide. Fmoc is typically 3:1. The solvents you use are these nasty greasy fishy smelling solvents (dmf, nmp). And the activating agents are really expensive compounds that you will slowly become allergic to if you keep working with peptides.
I personally have, though unpublished work, the first total (artificial) synthesis of ubiquitin, that I did as a grad student in my first year. Although it's 76 amino acids we synthesized it in two parts and stitched them together using a technique called "native chemical ligation", though we did something special called "folding-assisted native chemical ligation".
[+] [-] cing|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flobosg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosito|4 years ago|reply
From what I've read, as a layman, many peptides can increase cell growth which is sometimes associated with tumor growth, but they may also have a stabilizing effect on cell growth which wouldn't cause cancer at all, and could even be beneficial. I don't think there has been any evidenevidence linking peptides with cancer though. Would be eager to know if anyone has seen such evidence.
[+] [-] thriftwy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radicaldreamer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] im3w1l|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jryb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jryb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp0826|4 years ago|reply