Drug carriers for the delivery of therapeutic peptides

Peptides take on an increasingly important role as therapeutics in areas including diabetes, oncology, and metabolic, cardiovascular, and infectious diseases. In addition, many peptides such as insulin have been employed for many years. A challenge in the administration of peptide drugs is their often low hydrolytic stability, as well as other problems that are common to any drug treatment such as systemic distribution. There is a significant attention in the literature of protein drugs and their delivery strategies, but not many overviews are specifically dedicated to peptides. In this review, the different approaches to deliver peptides have been summarized where the focus is only on drug carriers based on organic materials. Initial discussion is on different methods of polymer-peptide conjugation before being followed by physical encapsulation techniques, which is divided into surfactant-based techniques and polymer carriers. Surfactant-based techniques are dominated by liposome, microemulsions and solid-lipid nanoparticles. The field widens further in the polymer field. The delivery of peptides has been enhanced using polymer-decorated liposomes, solid microspheres, polyelectrolyte complex, emulsions, hydrogels, and injectable polymers. The aim of this article is to give the reader an overview over the different types of carriers.