The potential role of peptides in cancer, infectious diseases, and autoimmunity: a narrative review

Abstract

In the last two decades, peptidomics, which can be defined as the science of studying the biologicalrelevance of peptides, has grown in relevance. Today, we can 1) define disease-associated–proteins in termsof short peptide modules, 2) precisely target cancer cells by hitting peptide sequences of tumour-associatedantigens, and 3) inactivate harmful cross-reactive autoantibodies, among others; indeed, scientific progresshas been made in epitope definition, and we can precisely identify the amino acid (aa) sites involved inimmunological reactions and locate antigenicity and immunogenicity within minimal immune pentapeptidedeterminants. Clinically, peptides offer new approaches for fighting the spread and re-emergence ofinfectious pathogens and provide new strategies for safe therapies in cancer and autoimmune pathologies.Here, this paper carries out a historical review of the role of peptides in medicine in the last decades.