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Therapeutic peptides review, decent overview but mostly oncology focused

Posted by grinder265 in Protocols & Stacks - 1 points, 4 comments.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8844085

Found this PMC review on therapeutic peptides and their current and future directions. It's a solid read if you want a bird's eye view of where peptide therapeutics are headed, covering everything from oncology to metabolic disease to delivery tech. The mechanisms section is genuinely useful for understanding why certain peptides do what they do at the receptor level.

My take is that it's heavy on the cancer side, which makes sense given the authors, but doesn't give much love to the regenerative or metabolic stuff a lot of us here actually care about. Also the delivery section is interesting because oral bioavailability and stability are still the main bottlenecks, and half the "exciting" stuff in the pipeline is just better formulation, not new mechanisms.

For those who've dug into it, which of the newer delivery approaches (cyclization, stapled peptides, nanoparticle carriers) do you think actually moves the needle for things like BPC or thymosin analogues, or is it still mostly hype?

Comments

  • fasted_scientist: Yeah I skimmed that one, agree it's oncology heavy, and a lot of the regenerative bits are brushed past pretty quick. On the delivery question though, ngl I think most of it is still hype for the compounds people actually run here. Stapled peptides and nanocarriers sound great in a paper, but the cost and scaling is a different game, and half the studies are in vitro or rodent models anyway. For BPC or TA1, the bottleneck isn't really the molecule, it's absorption and half life, and oral biohac
  • grinder265: Yeah the in vitro to rodent translation problem is real, and cost at scale kills a lot of those approaches before they ever hit human trials. Fair point on the absorption angle though. My takeaway is that for the everyday peptides, we're probably stuck with subcutaneous or IM for the foreseeable future unless some pharma company decides to spend real money on an oral version. You running anything oral right now or mostly injections?
  • tiredmira: Yeah the absorption point is basically where most of the biohacker interest lives, but you nailed it, the human data on oral BPC or TA1 is just thin. In vitro permeability numbers don't tell you much about what actually shows up in plasma at clinically relevant levels for these compounds. Cyclisation makes sense on paper but I want to see actual human PK before getting excited 🥗
  • grinder265: Yeah that's exactly the frustration. The in vitro stuff looks promising but permeability in a Caco-2 assay is not the same as a measurable plasma level after someone swallows a capsule. And most of the oral BPC studies I can find are either animal work or underpowered, with endpoints that don't really tell you what you want to know. Curious what you'd want to see in an actual human PK study to call it interesting, like what's the bar for you. Plasma concentration at a target threshold, or just

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