Contribution of poly(amino acids) to advances in pharmaceutical biotechnology

Recently, protein biotechnology generates tremendous impacts in therapeutic products. These products include enzymes, antibodies, hormones, blood factors, growth factors and regulatory factors. Protein, vaccine and gene therapy drugs could be formulated with suitable biomaterials to deliver active agents to their target sites at the right time and maintain therapeutic effects for proper durations. In this review article, we focus on poly(amino acids) or polymerized amino acids for their applications in drug delivery systems, vaccines, and gene therapy. The nomenclatures of poly(amino acids) are briefly introduced to systematically express synthetic polypeptides. In drug delivery systems, we introduce two applications of poly(amino acids) in pharmaceutical biotechnology, either as carriers to facilitate drug delivery, or as biomaterials to be formulated as suitable delivery systems for application in tissue engineering. Many short polypeptides are mapped from antigen motifs and used for vaccination. These poly(amino acids) provide protective effects in animal challenge tests and potential application in vaccine development to be briefly introduced. Finally, some reports related to new developed poly(amino acids) as DNA carriers for achieving gene delivery are also described in the text.