Affymax Research Institute, R.W. Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute, Scripps Research Institute other research news

Affymax and collaborators reported the ability to mimic the active binding area of EPO with a much smaller peptide that has no amino acid sequence similarity to the native hormone, yet binds to and biologically activates the EPO receptor. The report is the first showing that small peptides can mimic large protein hormones.

As published in Science, phage display peptide libraries and affinity selection techniques generated full agonist peptides active at the EPO receptor. A 14-amino acid sequence was determined to be the minimum consensus sequence. ...