Nuclear delivery and accumulation are very important for many anticancer drugs that interact with DNA or its associated enzymes in the nucleus. However, it is very difficult for neutrally and negatively charged anticancer drugs such as 10-hydroxycamptothecine (HCPT). Here we report a simple strategy to construct supramolecular nanomedicines for nuclear delivery of dual synergistic anticancer drugs. Our strategy utilizes the coassembly of a negatively charged HCPT-peptide amphiphile and the positively charged cisplatin. The resulting nanomaterials behave as the "Trojan Horse" that transported soldiers (anticancer drugs) across the walls of the castle (cell and nucleus membranes). Therefore, they show improved inhibition capacity to cancer cells including the drug resistant cancer cell and promote the synergistic tumor suppression property in vivo. We envision that our strategy of constructing nanomaterials by metal chelation would offer new opportunities to develop nanomedicines for combination chemotherapy.
Promising vaccine adjuvants of self‐assembling peptide hydrogels for protein ovalbumin (OVA) are introduced in this study. The hydrogels are formed by the enzyme of phosphatase, and the vaccine adjuvant potency of both l‐ and d‐peptide hydrogels is evaluated. The results indicate that, compared with the clinically used alum adjuvant, both l‐ and d‐peptide hydrogels can increase the IgG production of OVA for about 1.3 and 3.8 times, respectively. Both gels can enhance antigen uptake and induce dendritic cell maturation, and promote and prolong accumulation of antigen in lymph node, as well as evoke germinal center formation. However, the d‐peptide hydrogel with OVA exhibits a slightly more efficient accumulation of OVA in the lymph nodes and seems preventing tumor growth more significantly than its l‐counterpart. With the good biocompatibility and degradability of peptide hydrogels, the hydrogels described in this study have big potential for the production of protein vaccines for immunotherapy against different diseases.
Nano-materials formed by the self-assembly of small molecules are very promising for drug delivery, regenerative medicine, and detection of important analytes due to their unique properties, such as self-assembled multivalency, biocompatibility, and fast response to external stimuli. This tutorial review focuses on their applications in detection of important analytes. Self-assembling small molecules can show fast response to external stimuli. Therefore, the gel-sol/sol-gel phase transitions of supramolecular hydrogels that can be easily identified by naked eyes have been applied for the detection of enzymes and enzyme-involving analytes. The supramolecular hydrogels can also provide semi-wet environments that can retain the activity of enzymes and recognition properties of molecular probes. Thus, they provide good platforms for the detection of many biologically and environmentally important analytes. Besides, self-assembling small molecules show big differences in fluorescence or the F-NMR signal between their self-assembled and un-assembled stages. Such small molecules can be rationally designed through the integration of fluorescent dyes or fluorine containing molecules in the self-assembling small molecules. Therefore, extensive recent research efforts have been made to explore their detection applications based on the dis-assembly triggered fluorescence/F-NMR signal turn on or the self-assembly/aggregation induced fluorescence turn on. We believe that the research efforts made to this field will ultimately lead to the development of useful nano-materials for detection applications.
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