Development of novel drug delivery system (DDS) technologies for proteomic-based drug development

With the success of human genome projects, the focus of life science research has shifted to the functional and structural analyses of proteins, such as disease proteomics. These structural and functional analyses of expressed proteins in the cells and/or tissues are expected to contribute to the identification of therapeutically applicable proteins for various diseases. Thus, pharmaco-proteomic based drug development for protein therapies is most noticed currently. However, there is a clinical difficulty to use almost bioactive proteins, because of their very low stability and pleiotropic actions in vivo. To promote pharmaco-proteomic based drug development for protein therapies to various diseases, we have attempted to establish a system for creating functional mutant proteins (muteins) with desired properties, and to develop a site-specific polymer-conjugation system for further improving the therapeutic potency of proteins. In this review, we are introducing our original protein-drug innovation systems mentioned above.