Peptide-Enabled Targeted Delivery Systems for Therapeutic Applications

Mingpeng Liu; Xiaocui Fang; Yanlian Yang; Chen Wang

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2021.701504

Peptide-Enabled Targeted Delivery Systems for Therapeutic Applications

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2021 Jul 1:9:701504. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2021.701504. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Mingpeng Liu^{1

2

3}, Xiaocui Fang^{1

3}, Yanlian Yang^{1

3}, Chen Wang^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ CAS Key Laboratory of Biological Effects of Nanomaterials and Nanosafety, CAS Key Laboratory of Standardization and Measurement for Nanotechnology, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, China.
² Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Receptor-targeting peptides have been extensively pursued for improving binding specificity and effective accumulation of drugs at the site of interest, and have remained challenging for extensive research efforts relating to chemotherapy in cancer treatments. By chemically linking a ligand of interest to drug-loaded nanocarriers, active targeting systems could be constructed. Peptide-functionalized nanostructures have been extensively pursued for biomedical applications, including drug delivery, biological imaging, liquid biopsy, and targeted therapies, and widely recognized as candidates of novel therapeutics due to their high specificity, well biocompatibility, and easy availability. We will endeavor to review a variety of strategies that have been demonstrated for improving receptor-specificity of the drug-loaded nanoscale structures using peptide ligands targeting tumor-related receptors. The effort could illustrate that the synergism of nano-sized structures with receptor-targeting peptides could lead to enrichment of biofunctions of nanostructures.

Keywords: drug delivery; enhanced receptor-specificity; nanostructure; targeting peptide; tumor therapy.

Publication types

Review