Exploring Peptide-Based Nanostructures As Effective Drug Carriers

Peptides can assemble into a variety of discrete nanostructures that could serve as biodegradable drug carriers for cancer chemotherapy. In this work, we demonstrate our rational design of short peptide conjugates to create various nano-objects such as spheres, cylinders, and cylinders with a multicompartment core.  The critical micellization concentrations (CMC) of these conjugates can be tuned by molecular design, ranging in the nanomolar to micromolar scale.  We evaluated the potential use of these nanostructures as drug carriers. In our drug encapsulation experiments, higher loading capacity is often achieved using peptides with relatively larger volume of the hydrophobic segments.  In addition, by directly conjugating the anticancer drugs such as paclitaxel to a rationally designed short peptide, a quantitative and high drug loading can be achieved, and the resulting nanostructures can be used to encapsulate a different type of drugs. Our cytotoxicity experiments reveal that these supramolecular nanostructures can work effectively against a number of cancer cell lines including breast cancer, prostate cancer and ovarian cancer.