Newswise — NYU Tandon professors Mary Cowman and Jin Ryoun Kim recently published a paper describing a novel peptide with broad therapeutic potential to combat chronic inflammation in multiple diseases. The peptide, called Amilo 5-MER, was discovered by Professor David Naor and his colleague Dr. Shmuel Jaffe Cohen in the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. They showed that Amilo 5-MER has anti-inflammatory effects that reduce pathological and clinical symptoms in mouse models for rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and multiple sclerosis.
Based on Naor’s finding that the peptide binds to several proteins associated with inflammation, including Serum Amyloid A (SAA), Cowman and Kim proposed a working mechanism for the peptide. In a collaboration between the Israeli and Tandon teams they were able to show that the peptide inhibits…