Urocortin 2

Where it comes from

Made in

Hypothalamus and brainstem, heart, skeletal muscle, skin

Sent out by

Stress; in the heart and muscle, under glucocorticoids

Acts on

• Heart muscle (contraction)
• Arteries (dilation)
• Muscle (glucose uptake)
• Hypothalamus (appetite, delayed)

What it does

• Relaxes arteries and makes the heart contract harder without raising oxygen demand much
• Improves glucose handling in muscle
• Suppresses appetite hours after it is given

In medicine

• No approved medicine; in eight men with heart failure an hour of intravenous urocortin 2 raised cardiac output and ejection fraction and lowered blood pressure and vascular resistance, while urine volume fell ¹
• It is not measured in clinical practice: the mature human peptide has never been isolated, so assays rest on the sequence predicted from the gene

Beyond the body’s own use

• Human work stopped at those short infusions, and no urocortin 2 product has entered a phase 3 trial ¹
• Gene transfer is where the work moved: one intravenous dose of AAV8 carrying urocortin 2 improved function of the failing mouse heart for months ²
• Its glucose effect, better uptake into muscle, is an animal finding that has not been tested in people