Peptide-Based Supramolecular Materials for Cancer Therapeutics

Peptides offer great molecular attributes as building units to construct biomaterials that incorporate explicit bioactivities into well-defined structural features at the nanoscale. Here we present our recent efforts in the design, synthesis and self-assembly of peptide-based molecules for applications in drug delivery, cancer diagnosis and imaging, and tumor microenvironment mimicking.  Specifically, we take advantage of the design versatility of peptide primary and secondary structures to produce 0-D (spheres), 1-D (fibrils), 2-D (sheets and vesicles) nanostructures with the aim of controlling their interactions with cells of interest. Our preliminary results have shown that we can not only control size and shape of these nanoarchitectures, but also their surface chemistries as well as the mechanical properties of the resulting materials.  Interfacing of these nanostructures with cancer cells will also be reported.