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Systemic and Local Drug Delivery for Treating Diseases of the Central Nervous System in Rodent Models
Published on: August 16, 2010
Cathepsin-sensitive nanoscale drug delivery systems for cancer therapy and other diseases
Divya Dheer1, Julien Nicolas2, Ravi Shankar3
1Institut Galien Paris-Sud, Univ Paris-Sud, UMR CNRS 8612, Faculté de Pharmacie, 5 rue Jean-Baptiste Clément, F-92296 Châtenay-Malabry Cedex, France; Bio-organic Chemistry Division, CSIR-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, Jammu 180001, India; Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), CSIR-IIIM, Jammu Campus, Jammu 180001, India.
Abstract:
Cathepsins are an important category of enzymes that have attracted great attention for the delivery of drugs to improve the therapeutic outcome of a broad range of nanoscale drug delivery systems. These proteases can be utilized for instance through actuation of polymer-drug conjugates (e.g., triggering the drug release) to bypass limitations of many drug candidates. A substantial amount of work has been witnessed in the design and the evaluation of Cathepsin-sensitive drug delivery systems, especially based on the tetra-peptide sequence (Gly-Phe-Leu-Gly, GFLG) which has been extensively used as a spacer that can be cleaved in the presence of Cathepsin B. This Review Article will give an in-depth overview of the design and the biological evaluation of Cathepsin-sensitive drug delivery systems and their application in different pathologies including cancer before discussing Cathepsin B-cleavable prodrugs under clinical trials.
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