It's not a miracle cure, it's just a nicely different way of attacking a problem. It still has tradeoffs - I'm not versed on what they all are, but its tradeof

It's not a miracle cure, it's just a nicely different way of attacking a problem. It still has tradeoffs - I'm not versed on what they all are, but its tradeoffs are of a different kind than of small molecules. A few guesses of what those tradeoffs might look like: A peptide will be more expensive to synthesize in bulk, it will not have as long of a shelf-life, it likely has a different (not perfect) resistance mechanism and will be more or less effective on different specific microbes. It's likely not as effective on a per/molecule basis. And it's much larger, meaning it will have a greater difficulty diffusing through the body of an organism - and might actually be degraded more quickly once inside an organism because it's peptide-like. But the mere fact that there are alternative tools in our toolbox for different scenarios is useful in our fight against disease (if not a 'miracle'). DRGN1 is not the first of such antimicrobial peptides, but it was found in a systematic way, and once it was found it was systematically made more effective. This hints at workflows to mine and refine more genetically encoded peptides like it in the future.