Peptides and Their Conjugates for Cancer Therapy

Dear Colleagues,

Efficient tumor chemotherapy is still a challenge. Chemotherapeutic agents have many side effects because of their lack of selectivity. Therefore, the specific targeting of drug molecules into tumor cells is an important task to be solved. For this purpose, several antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) have been investigated in cancer therapy with success. Despite the fact that research on peptide–drug conjugates has been ongoing for decades, in recent years, small peptides have received even higher interest in drug delivery due to their high specificity, better tumor tissue permeability, and fairly low manufacturing costs in comparison with ADCs. It is well-known that the receptors of several hormone peptides (GnRH, somatostatin, bombesin, neurotensin, etc.) are overexpressed on tumor cells, and they might therefore be good targets for drug targeting. Moreover, a huge effort is being made to find additional tumor-specific cell surface proteins by phage display techniques to identify further homing peptides. It has also been demonstrated that the sequence modification of the selected peptides might increase the tumor selectivity, cellular uptake, and metabolism of the targeting moiety, resulting in peptide–drug conjugates with higher antitumor activity. Some peptides have also been applied efficiently for the specific delivery of drug-loaded nanoparticles to tumor cells. All of these results indicate the efficiency of homing peptides for drug targeting. It is believed that this hot topic that many research groups are working on might receive significant interest, and therefore it is worth opening a Special Issue on “Peptides and Their Conjugates for Cancer Therapy”.

Therefore, authors are invited to submit original research and review articles on the application of peptides in tumor therapy, mainly on the following topics:

• Peptides with antitumor activity and their interactions with cell cycle and biological pathways;
• Identification of target proteins on the tumor cell surface and peptides that recognize them;
• Development of peptide-based conjugates for different types of tumors, including imaging and therapy;
• Regulation of key tumor physiology processes including migration, invasiveness, autophagy, and angiogenesis by peptides and peptide-based conjugates;
• Development of peptide–drug conjugates for stem-like cancer cells.

Prof. Dr. Gábor Mező
Guest Editor

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• peptides
• homing peptides
• drug delivery systems (DDSs)
• peptide drug conjugates (PDCs)
• targeted tumor therapy
• cancer stem cells (CSCs)
• peptide decorated nanoparticles
• tumor growth inhibition