Peptide-Mediated Anticancer Drug Delivery

Abstract

An ideal drug delivery system should contain an appropriate therapeutic agent and biocompatible carrier. In this study, we investigated the ability of the all-complementary self-assembling peptide AC8 in stabilizing the anticancer compound and determined the in-vitro therapeutic efficacy of the peptide-mediated anticancer drug delivery. The all-complementary peptide AC8 was designed based on the amino acid pairing principle (AAP), which contains hydrogen bonding, electrostatic, and hydrophobic interaction amino acid pairs. AAP interactions make the peptide capable of self-assembling into β-sheet structure in solution in a concentration dependent manner. Peptide solution concentration is a key parameter in controlling the nanoscale assembling of the peptide. The critical assembly concentration (CAC) of the peptide was found ~ 0.01 mg/ml by several techniques. The all-complementary peptide AC8 was found to be able to stabilize neutral state of hydrophobic anticancer compound ellipticine in aqueous solution. The formation of peptide-ellipticine complex was monitored by fluorescence spectroscopy at different mass ratios of peptide-to-ellipticine. The anticancer activity of the complexes with neutral state of ellipticine was found to show great anticancer activity against two cancer cells lines, A-549 and MCF-7. This peptide-mediated anticancer delivery system showed the induction of apoptosis on cancer cells in vitro by flow Cytometry.