Identification and Characterization of Homing Peptides Using In Vivo Peptide Phage Display

Abstract

Each normal organ and pathological condition expresses a distinct set of molecules on their vasculature. These molecular signatures have been efficiently profiled using in vivo phage display. Several peptides homing to tumor blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and/or tumor cells as well as to various normal organs have been isolated using this method. The in vivo screening of phage libraries has also revealed novel tissue-specific biomarkers of the normal and diseased vasculature. Tumor-homing peptides have been successfully used to target therapeutics and imaging agents to tumors. In vivo phage display has also been used in the identification of cell and/or tumor type-specific cell-penetrating peptides, which further facilitate the transmembrane delivery of various cargo molecules into cells. In this review we describe experimental setup for a combined ex vivo and in vivo screening procedure to select both conventional and cell-penetrating peptides homing to brain tumors.

Cell Penetrating Peptides, Novel Vectors for Gene Therapy

“…One approach to circumvent this problem is to carry out the first cycle in cell culture using relevant cell types in order to reduce the likelihood of false positives. Subsequent cycles can then be carried out in vivo using the enriched pool from the in vitro cycle [30][31][32]. Such an approach has led to the identification of peptides targeting vascular endothelium [33], synovial tissue [27], dendritic cells [34], pancreatic islet cells [35] and cardiac myocytes [31], and has identified NRG (Asparginine-Arginine-Glycine) and RGD (Arginine-Glycine-Aspartic acid) motifs that target phage to tumor vasculature in nude tumor-bearing mice [36].…”

Sequence modification of heptapeptide selected by phage display as homing device for HT-29 colon cancer cells to improve the anti-tumour activity of drug delivery systems

“…Therefore, the search of new tumour homing peptides is a hot topic in targeted cancer therapy [11]. One of the approach often used to explore new peptides is a technique belonging to in vitro evolution methods: phage display is a useful tool to identify tumour specific peptides that can be used efficiently for anti-cancer drug targeting [12].…”

Phage‐Enabled Nanomedicine: From Probes to Therapeutics in Precision Medicine

“…The T7 phage library shows fewer amino acid biases, more normal distributions of the net charge of peptides, an increased peptide diversity, and a more normal distribution of the hydrophobicity of peptides when compared to the standard M13 temperate phage libraries. [74] …”