Peptide-based biopolymers in biomedicine and biotechnology

Abstract

Peptides are emerging as a new class of biomaterials due to their unique chemical, physical, and biological properties. The development of peptide-based biomaterials is driven by the convergence of protein engineering and macromolecular self-assembly. This review covers the basic principles, applications, and prospects of peptide-based biomaterials. We focus on both chemically synthesized and genetically encoded peptides, including poly-amino acids, elastin-like polypeptides, silk-like polymers and other biopolymers based on repetitive peptide motifs. Applications of these engineered biomolecules in protein purification, controlled drug delivery, tissue engineering, and biosurface engineering are discussed.

Peptide-Based Polymer Therapeutics

“…Herein, we review their different applications as drug/gene delivery carriers and imaging agents. Polypeptide applications cover many other areas such as their use in implants, nanogels or coatings, which are out of the scope of this review [27,30,85]. …”

“…For instance, poly(glutamic acid) (PGA), poly(lysine) (PLL) or poly(aspartate) have emerged as perfect candidates as they present the required carrier features, namely, biodegradability, high drug loading capacity and well-defined structures. These polymers have been catalogued as a novel family of materials due to their physical, chemical and biological properties derived from their controlled sequences and composition [26][27][28][29][30]. Polypeptides are able to adopt stable conformations and undergo hierarchical assembles to form highly organised supramolecular structures at the nanoscale.…”

Elastin-like polypeptides and their applications in anticancer drug delivery systems: a review

“…Kaufmann & Weberskirch (2006) have described efficient synthetic methods for ELPs based on the solid-phase peptide synthesis using resin as solid support in the presence of HoBt/PyBob as activating agents. Chow et al (2008) have reviewed the various available methods for the synthesis of ELPs. They reported that ELPs can be synthesized via chemical methods, namely solid phase peptide synthesis as synthetic polypeptides and by recombinant DNA methodologies as genetically encoded polypeptides.…”

“…This synthetic technique is, however, a cumbersome and expensive process (Chow et al, 2008). The presence of reactive side chain in these ELPs also makes them unstable over long periods of time and at higher temperatures (Nicolini et al, 2004).…”

Bioinspired Strategies for Hard Tissue Regeneration

“…Thus, protein based scaffolds would be highly beneficial to guide spatially-and temporally-complex multicellular processes of tissue regeneration. Peptide and protein based biomaterials have emerged as a new class of biomaterials that possesses unique and often superior properties when compared to conventional materials and are widely used for regenerative and reparative medicine (2,(12)(13)(14) . The main application of peptide-based biopolymers for tissue engineering is an injectable scaffold.…”