Discovery of novel prostate cancer targeted peptides and their use in drug delivery

Available chemotherapy options for prostate cancer are not efficient enough, and often cause debilitating side effects, because of the insufficient specificity. The current study focuses on isolating and developing peptides that can be used as vehicles to deliver drugs specifically into prostate cancer cells. We used a bacteriophage display peptide library, followed by bioinformatics analysis, to select promising prostate cancer specific peptides. We confirmed that these peptides effectively and specifically connect to prostate cancer cells, but not other cancer cell lines or normal cells. The novelty of discovered peptides is their ability to facilitate delivery of the conjugated drugs into the cell, thus enhancing drug effects, and overcoming drug resistance.

Future plans include chemical conjugation of the peptides to drugs commonly used in prostate cancer and testing their cytotoxic efficacy and specificity for the target cells. This will be followed by the therapeutic potential in xenograft models of prostate cancer.