Bioengineered elastin- and silk-biomaterials for drug and gene delivery.

Bioengineered elastin- and silk-biomaterials for drug and gene delivery. Adv Drug Deliv Rev. 2020 Oct 17;: Authors: Chambre L, Martín-Moldes Z, Parker RN, Kaplan DL Abstract Advances in medical science have led to diverse new therapeutic modalities, as well as enhanced understanding of the progression of various disease states. These findings facilitate the design and development of more customized and exquisite drug delivery systems that aim to improve therapeutic indices of drugs to treat a variety of conditions. Synthetic polymer-based drug carriers have often been the focus of such research. However, these structures suffer from challenges with heterogeneity of the starting material, limited chemical features, complex functionalization methods, and in some cases a lack of biocompatibility. Consequently, protein-based polymers have garnered much attention in recent years due to their monodisperse features, ease of production and functionalization, and biocompatibility. Genetic engineering techniques enable the advancement of protein-based drug delivery systems with finely tuned physicochemical properties, and thus an expanded level of customization unavailable with synthetic polymers. Of these genetically engineered proteins, elastin-like proteins (ELP), silk-like proteins (SLP), and silk-elastin-like proteins (SELP) provide a unique set of alternatives for designing drug delivery systems due to their inherent chemical and physic...
Source: Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews - Category: Drugs & Pharmacology Authors: Tags: Adv Drug Deliv Rev Source Type: research