Tag: peptide

Delivering Cancer and Diabetes Drugs in Pills Instead of Injections

Source: Danilo Alvesd on Unsplash

In a new Journal of the American Chemical Society paper, researchers describe how they are developing a new way for diabetes and cancer patients to manage their conditions by enabling drugs to be delivered in pill form instead of through injections.

Some drugs for these diseases are water soluble, so transporting them through the intestines, is not feasible and makes them impossible to administer orally. However, UCR scientists have created a chemical “tag” that can be added to these drugs, allowing them to enter blood circulation via the intestines.

This tag is composed of a small peptide. “Because they are relatively small molecules, you can chemically attach them to drugs, or other molecules of interest, and use them to deliver those drugs orally,” said research leader Min Xue, UC Riverside chemistry professor.

Xue’s laboratory was testing something unrelated when the researchers observed these peptides making their way into cells.

“We did not expect to find this peptide making its way into cells. It took us by surprise,” Xue said. “We always wanted to find this kind of chemical tag, and it finally happened serendipitously.”

This observation was unexpected, Xue said, because previously, the researchers believed that this type of delivery tag needed to carry positive charges to be accepted into the negatively charged cells. Their work with this neutral peptide tag, called EPP6, shows that belief was not accurate.

Testing the peptide’s ability to move through a body, the Xue group teamed up with Kai Chen’s group in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and fed the peptide to mice. With PET scans, the team observed the peptide accumulating in the intestines, and documented its ultimate transfer into the animals’ organs via the blood.

Having proven the tag successfully navigated the circulatory systems through oral administration, the team now plans to demonstrate that the tag can do the same thing when attached to a selection of drugs. “Quite compelling preliminary results make us think we can push this further,” Xue said.

Many drugs, including insulin, must be injected. The researchers are hopeful their next set of experiments will change that, allowing them to add this tag to a wide variety of drugs and chemicals, changing the way those molecules move through the body.

“This discovery could lift a burden on people who are already burdened with illness,” Xue said.

Source: University of California – Riverside

Peptide Discovery Could Halt Nerve Degeneration

A healthy neuron.
A healthy neuron. Credit: NIH

Promising results have been found in the quest for a treatment to halt nerve cell degeneration in disorders like Parkinson’s disease, by preventing their mitochondria from breaking apart with a particular peptide.

The research, published in Brain, examined how the long axons that carry messages between nerve cells in the brain can break down, which causes increasingly worse tightening of the leg muscles, leading to imbalance and eventually paralysis, in addition to other symptoms.

Animal studies have shown it may be a problem with the mitochondria that leads to the axons breaking down or not growing long enough. Since studying human nerve cells is difficult, the researchers made use of human stem cells they modified to become nerve cells with the genetic disorder for a particular type of hereditary spastic paraplegia.

“What we found was that the mitochondria in these cells were breaking apart, what we call mitochondrial fission, and that caused the axons to be shorter and less effective at carrying messages to the brain,” study leader Prof Xue-Jun Li said. “We then looked at whether a particular agent would change the way the nerve cells function — and it did. It inhibited the mitochondrial fission and let the nerve cells grow normally and also stopped further damage.”

What this means for the thousands of people affected by this type of genetic disorder is that this peptide could prove to be useful for a drug or other therapy to stop the nerve cells from becoming damaged or possibly even reverse the course of the damage. Additionally, gene therapy could also prevent mitochondrial damage, the researchers suggested, which would provide another strategy to reverse the nerve damage.

Source: University of Illinois Chicago