Synthesis of Starch-Functionalized Dibromomaleimide for Peptide Delivery
Description
The application of peptides as pharmaceutical drugs demonstrates many advantages including high specificity, low toxicity, and high biocompatibility and degradability. Although peptide-based therapeutics is an advantageous method of peptide delivery, one of the main challenges with the use of peptides is the enzymatic degradation of peptide-based drugs in the bloodstream. PEGylation has been used to increase the circulation half-life of peptides, but it does so at the cost of accumulating PEG in organs and releasing potentially toxic by-products upon degradation. One alternative is the covalent attachment of saccharides as the transport moieties. Utilization of saccharides is growing in the field of drug delivery because they are abundant, renewable, and low costing with excellent biodegradability and biocompatibility. In particular, starch is one of the most versatile polysaccharides for synthesizing new hybrid biomaterials because its structure can easily be manipulated. Our research group aims to synthesize a novel starch-peptide conjugated macromolecule consisting of peptides, a hetero-functionalized small molecule linker, and starch as a peptide drug carrier system. In previous studies, the macromolecular nature of the starch moiety caused the saturation of NMR signals and obscured the peak readings. Our prospective work includes investigating optimal reaction conditions to perform successful copper click reactions of the linker molecule and starch moiety in order to conjugate peptides to our starch-linker complex. We hope that final molecule will find utility in the development of peptides as drugs and other drug delivery systems.
Synthesis of Starch-Functionalized Dibromomaleimide for Peptide Delivery
The application of peptides as pharmaceutical drugs demonstrates many advantages including high specificity, low toxicity, and high biocompatibility and degradability. Although peptide-based therapeutics is an advantageous method of peptide delivery, one of the main challenges with the use of peptides is the enzymatic degradation of peptide-based drugs in the bloodstream. PEGylation has been used to increase the circulation half-life of peptides, but it does so at the cost of accumulating PEG in organs and releasing potentially toxic by-products upon degradation. One alternative is the covalent attachment of saccharides as the transport moieties. Utilization of saccharides is growing in the field of drug delivery because they are abundant, renewable, and low costing with excellent biodegradability and biocompatibility. In particular, starch is one of the most versatile polysaccharides for synthesizing new hybrid biomaterials because its structure can easily be manipulated. Our research group aims to synthesize a novel starch-peptide conjugated macromolecule consisting of peptides, a hetero-functionalized small molecule linker, and starch as a peptide drug carrier system. In previous studies, the macromolecular nature of the starch moiety caused the saturation of NMR signals and obscured the peak readings. Our prospective work includes investigating optimal reaction conditions to perform successful copper click reactions of the linker molecule and starch moiety in order to conjugate peptides to our starch-linker complex. We hope that final molecule will find utility in the development of peptides as drugs and other drug delivery systems.