Dispatches·Vol. 6·Updated monthly
Essays and columns on how preclinical peptide evidence is made, cited, inflated, and occasionally confirmed. Each piece is a literature summary or a methods argument — never usage guidance.
Lead·Evidence Review
In rat after rat, a gastric pentadecapeptide has been reported to speed tendon healing. Nearly every report descends from a single Zagreb research group. This month we trace the lineage, weigh what small unblinded cohorts can bear, and ask what a real confirmation would require.
Column·Underpowered
Eight rodents per group can find an effect the size of a barn door. It cannot find the modest effects that translation depends on — and a significant result from a tiny sample is more likely to be exaggerated than true. Our biostatistician walks through the arithmetic.
Explainer
DSS-induced colitis in mice is a chemical injury with an inflammatory aftermath — reproducible, convenient, and unlike any single human bowel disease. Why the model persists, what it measures well, and where KPV fits in its literature.
History
A 2004 rodent finding, cited in a review, quoted in a summary of that review, and flattened into a forum certainty within five years. A former research librarian traces the citation chain and finds one experiment holding up a building.
Methods
GHK-Cu changes gene expression in cultured human dermal fibroblasts. Skin exists to keep molecules like it out. On concentration, penetration, and the quiet elision that turns a dish result into a dermal claim.
History
How a gastric-juice peptide from a Zagreb cytoprotection program became the backbone of a global tendon-repair narrative — and what three decades of single-lineage authorship does to the weight of the evidence.
Evidence Review
LL-37 and its cousins kill bacteria in broth culture and modulate immunity in mice. The resistance argument for host-defense peptides is real but narrower than its reputation, and mouse sepsis models have burned the field before.
Explainer
Humanin in 2001, MOTS-c in 2015: the mitochondrial genome keeps yielding signaling peptides, and the mouse metabolic literature keeps growing faster than its replication base. A field guide to being early.
Methods·Editorial
Readers ask, reasonably, why a publication about peptide research refuses to discuss use. Because the literature we cover cannot bear the weight of that discussion — and because pretending otherwise is how evidence reviews become storefronts.