Researchers at the University of South Florida have developed a novel platform for targeted intracellular delivery by way of the growth factor mediated macropinocytosis pathway.
Cancer treatments have shown great improvement over the last few years. However, current treatments continue facing two major drawbacks: the killing of normal tissue along with cancerous tissue resulting in unwanted side effects and limited killing effects. This is largely due to issues with selective and efficient intracellular delivery of therapeutic agents, which is a significant challenge particular-ly in developing treatments of diseases like cancer.
Our inventors have developed a novel platform that allows for selective targeting of receptors that are over expressed in tumors while at the same time increases intracellular delivery of drugs by enhancing the process of growth factor mediated macropinocytosis. This platform has potential to result in decreased toxicity to healthy tissues associated with current chemotherapeutic treatments. Furthermore, because of the increase in intracellular uptake, and the flexibility of this platform, delivery of many types of cargo is possible, such as therapeutic proteins, pharmaceuticals, peptides or genes. Thus, this platform provides for applications in areas of gene therapy and non-viral transfection in addition to cancer treatment.
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