Tumor Microenvironment-Responsive Peptide-Based Supramolecular Drug Delivery System

Wenbo Zhang; Lanlan Yu; Tianjiao Ji; Chenxuan Wang

doi:10.3389/fchem.2020.00549

Tumor Microenvironment-Responsive Peptide-Based Supramolecular Drug Delivery System

Front Chem. 2020 Jul 22:8:549. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2020.00549. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Wenbo Zhang¹, Lanlan Yu¹, Tianjiao Ji², Chenxuan Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Biology, Department of Biophysics and Structural Biology, Peking Union Medical College, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.
² Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery, Department of Anesthesiology, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.

Abstract

Physical and biochemical differences between tumor tissues and normal tissues provide promising triggering factors that can be utilized to engineer stimuli-responsive drug delivery platforms for cancer treatment. Rationally designed peptide-based supramolecular architectures can perform structural conversion by responding to the tumor microenvironment and achieve the controlled release of antitumor drugs. This mini review summarizes recent approaches for designing internal trigger-responsive drug delivery platforms using peptide-based materials. Peptide assemblies that exhibit a stimuli-responsive structural conversion upon acidic pH, high temperature, high oxidative potential, and the overexpressed proteins in tumor tissues are emphatically introduced. We also discuss the challenges of current peptide-based supramolecular delivery platforms against cancer.

Keywords: drug delivery; peptide; stimuli–response; supramolecular assembly; tumor microenvironment.

Publication types

Review