Peptide directorySkin, immune & repair

HB-EGF

A growth factor the heart needs to form, and diphtheria toxin’s door into cells.

Where it comes from

Made in
Macrophages, smooth muscle, keratinocytes, heart muscle, uterine lining
Sent out by
Shed by ADAM proteases when G protein-coupled receptors or injury call for it
Acts on
  • Smooth muscle
  • Keratinocytes
  • Heart valves and muscle
  • Blastocyst at implantation

What it does

  • Needed for the heart valves and chambers to form; mice without it die of heart failure 4
  • The strongest EGF-family stimulus for smooth muscle and keratinocytes 1
  • Prepares the uterine lining for the embryo to attach

In medicine

  • No medicine. Its membrane-bound form is the diphtheria toxin receptor, which is why mice, whose version the toxin does not bind, resist it, and why the toxin is used in the laboratory to kill chosen cells 2
  • Nothing is measured through it in practice

Beyond the body’s own use

  • The newborn gut is where it is studied: in rat models of necrotising enterocolitis, HB-EGF protected the intestinal stem cells and kept blood flowing through the gut wall. There is no human trial 3
  • The rest of the work is in animals too: skin wound healing, and the smooth muscle thickening of injured arteries, which is the growth it was first found to drive 1

Sources

  1. Higashiyama et al., A heparin-binding growth factor secreted by macrophage-like cells, Science 1991
  2. Naglich et al., Expression cloning of a diphtheria toxin receptor, Cell 1992
  3. Chen et al., HB-EGF protects intestinal stem cells in a rat model of necrotising enterocolitis, Laboratory Investigation 2012
  4. Iwamoto et al., HB-EGF and ErbB signalling is essential for heart function, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2003

This card describes what a medicine is for and what the evidence says; it recommends nothing. Talk to your clinician about anything you read here.