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Regarding the mechanism of action of a proposed peptide agonist of the bone morphogenetic protein receptor activin-like kinase 3

Nature Medicine volume 19, pages 809–810 (2013)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

Advances to molecular medicine require not only novel, well-documented observations but also that these observations are placed in the context of the existing molecular understanding of the problem under study or transform this understanding with unexpected discoveries. In the absence of this context, observations that run counter to existing knowledge do not effectively challenge current paradigms; they simply report phenomena that experts dismiss and nonexperts puzzle over. The recent paper by Sugimoto et al.1 combines a body of results for which the underlying mechanism, to our minds, is unexpected given the current body of knowledge, and thus we feel the results in the manuscript obscure, rather than advance, the fields of bone morphogenic protein (BMP) signaling and rational peptide drug design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Developmental Biology, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Malcolm Whitman & Vicki Rosen

  2. Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Malcolm Whitman

  3. Laboratory of Molecular Vertebrate Embryology, Rockefeller University, New York, New York, USA

    Ali H Brivanlou

  4. Department of Biomedical Sciences, Baylor College of Dentistry, Dallas, Texas, USA

    Jay C Groppe

  5. Biozentrum Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Walter Sebald

  6. Lehrstuhl für Molekulare Pflanzenphysiologie und Biophysik, Julius-von-Sachs Institut der Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Thomas Mueller

Authors
  1. Malcolm Whitman
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  2. Vicki Rosen
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  3. Ali H Brivanlou
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  4. Jay C Groppe
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  5. Walter Sebald
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  6. Thomas Mueller
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Correspondence to Malcolm Whitman.

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Competing interests

M.W. is an inventor on patent applications USPTO 13/058,486 and 61/586,271 with potential relevance to the treatment of fibrosis.

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Whitman, M., Rosen, V., Brivanlou, A. et al. Regarding the mechanism of action of a proposed peptide agonist of the bone morphogenetic protein receptor activin-like kinase 3. Nat Med 19, 809–810 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3080

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