Bacteriophages are specific antagonists to bacterial hosts. These viral entities have attracted growing interest as optimal vaccine delivery vehicles. Phages are well-matched for vaccine design due to being highly stable under harsh environmental conditions, simple and inexpensive large scale production, and potent adjuvant capacities. Phage vaccines have efficient immunostimulatory effects and present a high safety profile because these viruses have made a constant relationship with the mammalian body during a long-standing evolutionary period. The birth of phage display technology has been a turning point in the development of phage-based vaccines. Phage display vaccines are made by expressing multiple copies of an antigen on the surface of immunogenic phage particles, thereby eliciting a powerful and effective immune response. Also, the ability to produce combinatorial peptide libraries with a highly diverse pool of randomized ligands has transformed phage display into a straightforward, versatile and high throughput screening methodology for the identification of potential vaccine candidates against different diseases in particular microbial infections. These libraries can be conveniently screened through an affinity selection-based strategy called biopanning against a wide variety of targets for the selection of mimotopes with high antigenicity and immunogenicity. Also, they can be panned against the antiserum of convalescent individuals to recognize novel peptidomimetics of pathogen-related epitopes. Phage display has represented enormous promise for finding new strategies of vaccine discovery and production and current breakthroughs promise a brilliant future for the development of different phage-based vaccine platforms.

Due to the digestible refractory and absorbable structures of bioactive peptides (BPs), they could induce notable biological impacts on the living organism. In this regard, the current study was devoted to providing an overview regarding the available methods for BPs generation by the aid of a systematic review conducted on the published articles up to April 2019. In this context, the PubMed and Scopus databases were screened to retrieve the related publications. According to the results, although the characterization of BPs mainly has been performed using enzymatic and microbial in‐vitro methods, they cannot be considered as suitable techniques for further stimulation of digestion in the gastrointestinal tract. Therefore, new approaches for both in‐vivo and in‐silico methods for BPs identification should be developed to overcome the obstacles that belonged to the current methods. The purpose of this review was to compile the recent analytical methods applied for studying various aspects of food‐derived biopeptides, and emphasizing generation at in vitro, in vivo, and in silico.

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Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women worldwide. Although patients are often diagnosed in the early and curable stages, the treatment of metastatic breast cancer remains a major clinical challenge. The combination of chemotherapy with new targeting agents, such as bevacizumab, is helpful in improving patient survival; however, novel treatment strategies are required to improve clinical outcomes. The insulin-like growth factor-I receptor (IGF-IR) is a tyrosine kinase cell surface receptor which is involved in the regulation of cell growth and metabolism. Previous studies have shown that activation of the IGF-IR signaling pathway promotes proliferation, survival, and metastasis of breast cancer cells. Additionally, overexpression of IGF-IR is associated with breast cancer cell resistance to anticancer therapies. Recently, IGF-IR has been introduced as a marker of stemness in breast cancer cells and there is also accumulating evidence that IGF-IR contributes to the establishment and maintenance of breast cancer epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Therefore, pharmacological or molecular targeting of IGF-IR could be a promising strategy, in the treatment of patients with breast cancer, particularly in order to circumvent the therapeutic resistance and targeting breast cancer stem/progenitors. Currently, many strategies have been developed for targeting IGF-IR, some have entered clinical trials and some are in preclinical stages for breast cancer therapy. In this review, we will first discuss on the biology of IGF-IR in an attempt to find the role of this receptor in breast cancer and then discuss about therapeutic strategies to target this receptor.

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