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Military.com reported on 5 October on the PEPTIDES for Veterans Act (H.R. 10212), a House bill that would direct the Department of Veterans Affairs to review existing peptide regulations and guidance and report to Congress within 180 days, then run an 18-month study of peptide-based therapies. According to the bill text as reported, a pilot with volunteer participants would follow only if the study's findings support it. The bill was introduced on 1 September, referred to the House Veterans' Affairs health subcommittee on 8 September and has not advanced beyond introduction; it does not change the legal status of any peptide.
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For research-community awareness only. Not legal advice.
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Technology Networks reported on 5 October on a Scripps Research study in PNAS in which computationally designed proteins that sit inside the cell membrane associated with Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4). Eight of nine designs showed signs of binding in a light-based proximity assay, and one, Design-6, substantially reduced NF-ΞΊB signalling in cultured HEK cells. The authors note the work used a convenience cell line and still needs confirming in more relevant cell types.
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BSR reported on 4 October that the main acceptance period for Samsung Biologics' all-cash offer for Swiss peptide manufacturer PolyPeptide Group, valued at about CHF 1.46 billion, closes at 4 p.m. Swiss time on 12 October, with completion targeted for the end of 2026. The report notes that metabolic peptides now make up about 68% of PolyPeptide's revenue and that new large-scale solid-phase synthesis capacity typically takes 18 to 36 months to build, which keeps capacity tight for smaller research and development batches.
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A Texas A&M team reported PReP-Bicyc in Nature Communications on 3 October, an additive-free method that turns phage-displayed peptide libraries into bicyclic peptides using a purpose-designed linker, 4,6-dichloropyrimidine-2-carbonitrile, under mild conditions that keep the phage viable. Screening against the protein PD-1 gave sub-micromolar bicyclic ligands, the best with a dissociation constant of about 400 nM, that selectively labelled PD-1-expressing cells in the lab.
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Scienmag reported on 4 October on pLM-HP, a model published in the Journal of Advanced Research that combines the ESM2 protein language model with a bidirectional LSTM to predict whether a short peptide sequence is a hormone. On an independent test set it reached a balanced accuracy of 95.64% and an AUC of 0.991, and a mid-sized ESM2 variant outperformed the largest one. The authors note the model uses sequence only, without structural context.
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