When, in the early 1990s, Victor Hruby and Mac Hayley’s group at the University of Arizona synthesized a cyclic analog of ?-MSH, it is unlikely that any of them imagined that three decades later their development would become one of the most talked-about peptides outside of academic circles. Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened with…

In the late 1990s, an Italian research group led by Ezio Ghigo of the University of Turin published a series of studies that fundamentally changed our understanding of how growth hormone secretion can be pharmacologically modulated. At the center of these studies was hexarelin – a six-residue synthetic peptide capable of inducing a potent and…