Peptide-functionalized delivery vehicles for enhanced cancer therapy

Abstract

Functional peptides that are made up of diverse endogenous amino acids with a specific sequence and length have shown various functionalities including specific biological recognition and cell penetrating ability for biomedical applications. Therefore, incorporation of peptide with a certain tailor-made amino acid sequence to the delivery systems has endowed the resulting delivery vehicles with specific functions, which provided a robust strategy for enhancing the therapeutic efficiency for malignant diseases. To make a timely review on this hot subject of research, we summarized the recent progress on peptide-functionalized delivery vehicles for enhanced cancer therapy with an emphasis on the chemistry adopted for the conjugation of peptide compared to most of the published reviews with a focus on the property and performance of the peptide-functionalized delivery systems. The primary synthetic strategies used for peptide conjugation were first summarized. An exhibition of four different types of peptide-functionalized delivery vehicles were next presented following a classification standard of the functions of each peptide category including tumor-targeting peptide, cell-penetrating peptide, subcellular organelle-targeting peptide and tumor-penetrating peptide. A concluding remark on the future direction of this rapidly developing research field was made finally. The important principles on the design of peptide, screening of the conjugation strategy, and optimization of peptide property that were drawn from the detailed comparison of the representative literature in this review will provide useful guidelines for the future development of advanced peptide-functionalized delivery platforms with enhanced therapeutic efficiency for cancer therapy.

Keywords: Cancer therapy; Delivery vehicle; Peptide; Targeted delivery.