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.
Highlights
The clinical efficacy and outcome of conventional molecular chemotherapeutics against tumors are limited by several undesirable properties, including the poor solubility, the short half-life in vivo, the weak penetration capability, and the low specificity (Tang et al, 2014; Liu et al, 2016; Wang et al, 2017, 2018; Luo et al, 2019)
The overproduction of lactic acid generated by the enhanced glycolysis in tumor cells leads to a slightly acidic tumor microenvironment, i.e., pH 6.5 to 6.8, which is lower than the pH of normal tissues around 7.4 (Romero-Garcia et al, 2011; Ji et al, 2013). (ii) High local temperature
We review recent approaches to the development of stimuli–response self-assembled peptide-based materials that exhibit promising therapeutic effects to deliver drugs to tumor vasculature or tumor cells
Summary
The clinical efficacy and outcome of conventional molecular chemotherapeutics against tumors are limited by several undesirable properties, including the poor solubility, the short half-life in vivo, the weak penetration capability, and the low specificity (Tang et al, 2014; Liu et al, 2016; Wang et al, 2017, 2018; Luo et al, 2019). The distinct physical and biochemical characteristics of tumors differing from normal tissues provide promising targets for engineering stimuli–response peptide-assembled DDSs (Ji et al, 2013; Raza et al, 2019; Xiao et al, 2019a; Lian and Ji, 2020). We review recent approaches to the development of stimuli–response self-assembled peptide-based materials that exhibit promising therapeutic effects to deliver drugs to tumor vasculature or tumor cells.
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