Novel Drug Delivery Strategies That Target Specific Proteins to Promote Effective Therapeutics

A special issue of Pharmaceutics (ISSN 1999-4923). This special issue belongs to the section "Drug Delivery and Controlled Release".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2024) | Viewed by 922

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences, The University of Padova, Via Marzolo, 5, 35131 Padova, Italy
Interests: targeted delivery; protein-based nanoparticles; avidin biotin; bioconjugation; PEG chemistry; sol-gel silica; immunodiagnostics

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Guest Editor
VIB, Department of Oncology, KU Leuven, Herestraat 49, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
Interests: novel anti-cancer agents; protein modification; drug discovery; disease modeling
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Proteins are involved in various biological processes and pathways that are essential for the normal functioning of cells and tissues. However, when these proteins are dysregulated, mutated, or overexpressed, they can cause or contribute to various diseases, such as cancer, inflammation, infection, neurodegeneration, and metabolic disorders. Therefore, targeting these proteins with specific drugs can modulate their activity and restore the balance of the system.

However, delivering drugs to induce protein degradation/ aggregation,  or block their activity is a significant task. There are many challenges and obstacles that need to be overcome, such as the stability, solubility, bioavailability, immunogenicity, toxicity, and specificity of the drugs. Moreover, the drugs need to reach the target site in sufficient concentration and duration to exert their intended therapeutic effect.

In this Special Issue, we invite researchers to submit original research articles and reviews that cover various aspects of novel drug delivery strategies to target specific proteins in diseases. We welcome contributions that address the following topics:

  • Molecular design, expression, purification, characterization, safety, and efficacy of drugs aimed to target proteins for therapy;
  • Design and development of novel experimental and theoretical methods for drug discovery to target disease-related proteins, with an emphasis on the mechanisms of drug interference with protein-driven biological pathways;
  • Peptide-based degraders such as protacs and peptins that can induce the degradation of target proteins by hijacking the ubiquitin-proteasome system or disrupting protein–protein interactions.

We hope that this Special Issue will provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art and future directions in targeting proteins to alleviate diseases using drug discovery technology.

Dr. Margherita Morpurgo
Dr. Raj Nayan Sewduth
Guest Editors

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

15 pages, 492 KiB  
Review
Recent Advances in Peptide Drug Discovery: Novel Strategies and Targeted Protein Degradation
by Katarina Vrbnjak and Raj Nayan Sewduth
Pharmaceutics 2024, 16(11), 1486; https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics16111486 - 20 Nov 2024
Viewed by 568
Abstract
Recent technological advancements, including computer-assisted drug discovery, gene-editing techniques, and high-throughput screening approaches, have greatly expanded the palette of methods for the discovery of peptides available to researchers. These emerging strategies, driven by recent advances in bioinformatics and multi-omics, have significantly improved the [...] Read more.
Recent technological advancements, including computer-assisted drug discovery, gene-editing techniques, and high-throughput screening approaches, have greatly expanded the palette of methods for the discovery of peptides available to researchers. These emerging strategies, driven by recent advances in bioinformatics and multi-omics, have significantly improved the efficiency of peptide drug discovery when compared with traditional in vitro and in vivo methods, cutting costs and improving their reliability. An added benefit of peptide-based drugs is the ability to precisely target protein–protein interactions, which are normally a particularly challenging aspect of drug discovery. Another recent breakthrough in this field is targeted protein degradation through proteolysis-targeting chimeras. These revolutionary compounds represent a noteworthy advancement over traditional small-molecule inhibitors due to their unique mechanism of action, which allows for the degradation of specific proteins with unprecedented specificity. The inclusion of a peptide as a protein-of-interest-targeting moiety allows for improved versatility and the possibility of targeting otherwise undruggable proteins. In this review, we discuss various novel wet-lab and computational multi-omic methods for peptide drug discovery, provide an overview of therapeutic agents discovered through these cutting-edge techniques, and discuss the potential for the therapeutic delivery of peptide-based drugs. Full article
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