Pathological changes in a diseased site are often accompanied by abnormal activities of various biomolecules in and around the involved cells. Identifying the location and expression levels of these biomolecules could enable early-stage diagnosis of the related disease, the design of an appropriate treatment strategy, and the accurate assessment of the treatment outcomes. Over the past two decades, a great diversity of peptide-based nanoprobes (PBNs) have been developed, aiming to improve the in vitro and in vivo performances of water-soluble molecular probes through engineering of their primary chemical structures as well as the physicochemical properties of their resultant assemblies. In this review, we introduce strategies and approaches adopted for the identification of functional peptides in the context of molecular imaging and disease diagnostics, and then focus our discussion on the design and construction of PBNs capable of navigating through physiological barriers for targeted delivery and improved specificity and sensitivity in recognizing target biomolecules. We highlight the biological and structural roles that low-molecular-weight peptides play in PBN design and provide our perspectives on the future development of PBNs for clinical translation.
Respiratory illnesses are prevalent around the world, and inhalation‐based therapies provide an attractive, noninvasive means of directly delivering therapeutic agents to their site of action to improve treatment efficacy and limit adverse systemic side effects. Recent trends in medicine and nanoscience have prompted the development of inhalable nanomedicines to further enhance effectiveness, patient compliance, and quality of life for people suffering from lung cancer, chronic pulmonary diseases, and tuberculosis. Herein, we discuss recent advancements in the development of inhalable nanomaterial‐based drug delivery systems and analyze several representative systems to illustrate their key design principles that can translate to improved therapeutic efficacy for prevalent respiratory diseases.
This article is categorized under:
Therapeutic Approaches and Drug Discovery > Nanomedicine for Respiratory Disease
Peptide templates can play a critical role in the controllable syntheses of catalysts owing to their flexible binding with specific metallic surfaces and self-assembly characteristics.
Polyelectrolyte
complex (PEC) nanoparticles assembled from plasmid
DNA (pDNA) and polycations such as linear polyethylenimine
(lPEI) represent a major nonviral delivery vehicle
for gene therapy tested thus far. Efforts to control the size, shape,
and surface properties of pDNA/polycation nanoparticles
have been primarily focused on fine-tuning the molecular structures
of the polycationic carriers and on assembly conditions such as medium
polarity, pH, and temperature. However, reproducible production of
these nanoparticles hinges on the ability to control the assembly
kinetics, given the nonequilibrium nature of the assembly process
and nanoparticle composition. Here we adopt a kinetically controlled
mixing process, termed flash nanocomplexation (FNC), that accelerates
the mixing of pDNA solution with polycation lPEI solution to match the PEC assembly kinetics through
turbulent mixing in a microchamber. This achieves explicit control
of the kinetic conditions for pDNA/lPEI nanoparticle assembly, as demonstrated by the tunability of nanoparticle
size, composition, and pDNA payload. Through a combined
experimental and simulation approach, we prepared pDNA/lPEI nanoparticles having an average of 1.3
to 21.8 copies of pDNA per nanoparticle and average
size of 35 to 130 nm in a more uniform and scalable manner than bulk
mixing methods. Using these nanoparticles with defined compositions
and sizes, we showed the correlation of pDNA payload
and nanoparticle formulation composition with the transfection efficiencies
and toxicity in vivo. These nanoparticles exhibited
long-term stability at −20 °C for at least 9 months in
a lyophilized formulation, validating scalable manufacture of an off-the-shelf
nanoparticle product with well-defined characteristics as a gene medicine.
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