Peptides like drones: identify and reach the target

Cancer is the second worldwide cause of death with only limited outcomes in the development of cancer treatments. While surgery and radiotherapy are the primary treatments for local and nonmetastatic cancers, chemotherapy is the main choice in metastatic cancers. Unfortunately, anticancer drugs also affect healthy tissues, which definitely limits their use in a clinical setting. The actual scenario is the search of an ideal therapy characterized by effective and targeted treatments. Peptides certainly represent an emerging and promising strategy for development of molecules for both diagnostics and therapy. They offer several advantages such as ease, rapid and cost-efficient synthesis and option to modulate their function and/or proteolytic degradation profile by modifying their amino acid sequence and their structure. Peptides can be exploited to provide specificity for tumor tissues, lower toxicity, lower chances of developing resistance and opportunity to design personalized therapies. As a matter of fact, in order to develop an ideal drug for clinical applications, tumor targeting, cell penetrating and death inducing peptides should be combined. The present talk will deal with our recently developed peptide-functionalized nanosystems as a toolbox to use for personalized therapy. [1]