People and places
People and places: 5 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Prague Institute That Redesigned a Hormone
In 1967 chemists at a Czechoslovak institute made two small changes to a nine-residue hormone and produced a molecule that kept one of its jobs and largely dropped the other. It became one of the best-known peptide drugs in the world, and it came from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.
The Two Insulin Houses of Copenhagen
For about sixty-five years one Danish city was home to two rival insulin makers, founded by a quarrel and bound together by a shared sense of mission. How they began, what they competed over, and why they ended as a single foundation-owned company.
The Other Peptide Tradition
In Russia these are registered medicines with decades of published work behind them; in Britain most doctors have never heard of them. The gap between those two facts is not a verdict on the science — and that turns out to be much harder to live with than one.
The Zagreb School and a Literature With One Centre
Several hundred papers report that one short peptide accelerates repair in almost every tissue it has been tested on. Nearly all of them trace back to a single university programme — which is the most interesting thing about the whole affair.
The Arizona Lab and the Drug That Escaped
One university programme in the Sonoran Desert set out to invent a tan you could get without the sun. It ended up producing both a licensed prescription medicine and one of the most widely misused unlicensed peptides in circulation.