The peptide antibiotics
The peptide antibiotics: 4 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Antibiotic That Sat in a Drawer for Six Years
A large company walked away from a promising molecule after a muscle signal and a disappointing dosing schedule. A small one with no products picked it up in 1997 and found that the schedule, not the molecule, had been the problem.
The Brown Liquid They Called Mississippi Mud
A parcel of soil from a Borneo forest reached a pharmaceutical laboratory in Indiana in the early 1950s. Within a few years it had become the antibiotic hospitals still keep for when almost everything else fails. The path between the two was stranger than the drug.
The Peptide in the Cheese: A Century of Nisin
It began as a nuisance in a dairy culture in 1928. It is now a code on an ingredients list, E234, eaten by millions who have never heard of it. The history of nisin is the history of a peptide antibiotic that became a food ingredient instead of a medicine.
The Soil That Was Fed Bacteria: Gramicidin, 1939
Two years before penicillin was purified, a French-born microbiologist at the Rockefeller Institute set out to find an antibiotic on purpose, by feeding dirt. What came out of the soil was the first antibiotic to reach a clinic, and it was a peptide.