Therapeutic peptides

Therapeutic Potentials of Antimicrobial Peptides

Volume 5 • Issue 3 • 2013 Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are small proteins (<100 amino acids) which include alpha-defensins, beta-defensins and the cathelicidin LL-37 in humans [1]. Alpha-defensins are expressed in neutrophils as part of their non-oxidative antimicrobial mechanismsand are also found in Paneth cells in the intestine [2,3]. They are synthesized as precursors that are proteolytica...

Antimicrobial Peptides as Therapeutic Agents

Copyright © 2012 Mathew Upton et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In developing this special issue, we sought to raise awareness of the potential of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) for clinical use and to highligh...

Therapeutic antimicrobial peptides may compromise natural immunity.

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been proposed as a promising new class of antimicrobials despite warnings that therapeutic use could drive the evolution of pathogens resistant to our own immunity peptides. Using experimental evolution, we demonstrate that Staphylococcus aureus rapidly evolved resistance to pexiganan, a drug-candidate for diabetic leg ulcer infections. Evolved resistance was ...

Cationic antimicrobial peptides. A future therapeutic option?

Synthetic therapeutic peptides: science and market.

The decreasing number of approved drugs produced by the pharmaceutical industry, which has been accompanied by increasing expenses for R&D, demands alternative approaches to increase pharmaceutical R&D productivity. This situation has contributed to a revival of interest in peptides as potential drug candidates. New synthetic strategies for limiting metabolism and alternative routes of administ...