Peptide Based Therapeutics: New Strategy to Treatment of Therapy Resistant Cancer

Treatment of tumor cells with macromolecular chemotherapy no longer holds a preferred choice of treatment due to emerge of chemo or radio resistant tumor cells. In resistance tumor cells, up regulation of DNA repair pathway proteins often enables tumor cells to prevent cell death triggered by DNA damaging agents. Furthermore, Increasing evidence gained recently over the cross talk between DNA repair pathways (eg BER, HR, and NHEJ) and proteins involved in repair (eg. PCNA, AlkB proteins).Human AlkB proteins are a group of DNA Alkylation repair proteins involved in repair of 1MeA and 3MeC caused by alkylating agents such as Cisplatin and carboplatins. Moreover, recent studies had shown that inhibitors of specific DNA repair pathway by peptide based therapeutics in addition to combination therapy by chemo therapeutics has shown promising results in chemo sensitization of therapy resistant tumor cells. Currently, use of peptide therapeutics has exhibited high efficacy and low chemo toxicity. One of the recognized approaches for improving the efficacy of therapeutic potential is by blocking the interactive motifs between important cell cycle regulating enzymes by administration of blocking peptides for increasing overall efficiency of cytotoxic agents. Thus peptide base therapeutics could be used to treat drug resistant cancer cells or delivery of the therapeutics to the target cancer cells.