Two molecules take on the gut's civil war

Ulcerative colitis still defeats too many patients — they stop responding to drugs or never reach remission. Georgia State researchers, mining the body's own phase II metabolites, built two modified tripeptides, MLY2 and MLY8, that outperformed their parent molecule: restoring colon length in mice and quieting inflammatory cytokines in colon tissue from treatment-resistant patients. Early days, but a genuinely new drug-discovery path. Published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.