Peptide News Digest

#Cyclic-Peptides

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Research · View digest

EPFL Team Builds Membrane-Permeable Cyclic Peptides From Scratch, Targeting a Core Barrier to Oral and Intracellular Peptide Drugs

A study from Christian Heinis's lab, published June 1 in Nature Chemical Biology, screened a library of 15,360 random cyclic peptides for the rare ability to cross cell membranes, then refined a lead (Peptide 30, 890.6 daltons) that blocked the intracellular Keap1-Nrf2 interaction in living cells. By engineering lower charge, fewer hydrogen-bond donors, and smaller polar surface area, the approach reaches targets inside cells without starting from a known ligand, a route toward peptide drugs that can be taken orally.

Research · View digest

bioRxiv (May 1): Generative AI Designs Peptides with Custom Secondary Structure Motifs Using Reduced Amino-Acid Alphabets

A May 1 bioRxiv preprint introduces a generative AI protein-design model trained on hundreds of thousands of structures from the RCSB PDB to produce peptides with custom secondary structure motifs while operating on reduced amino-acid alphabets. The work targets a real bottleneck in cyclic peptide drug development — generating sequences that fold into specified secondary-structure scaffolds without exhausting the full 20-letter design space, which lowers the barrier for synthesis and downstream maturation. It joins the recent University of Utah PapB enzymatic cyclization paper, the Nature Communications few-shot AI Acinetobacter pipeline, and Profluent's recombinase work as part of the broader AI-peptide-design wave through April–May 2026.