A Comprehensive Review on Elastin-Like Polypeptides (ELPs): Characterizations, Synthesis, Purification and Application as Nanoparticles in Drug Delivery of Cancer
Keywords:
Cancer, Elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs), Inverse transition temperature (ITT), Chemotherapeutic drugs, ELP nanoparticlesAbstract
Cancer is the most challenging disease with high rates of prevalence and mortality in the world. Traditional therapies of cancer include surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy are often unsuccessful in some patients with tumor recurrence. Recently, application of nanoparticles and nanomaterials have developed based on targeted therapy to decrease side effects and non-specificity of current treatments. Elastin like-polypeptides (ELPs) are synthetic and temperature-sensitive biopolymers in the form of repeating polypeptides that attract attention of researchers to use in biomedical applications due to exhibiting some outstanding features such as inverse transition temperature (ITT), high biocompatibility, biodegradability, self-assembly and stability. This review deals with characterizations of ELP, de novo synthesis and purification. In addition, it highlights some applications of ELP in protein purification, biomedical application, tissue engineering, vaccine carriers as well as usage as a drug delivery system. Moreover, it summarizes application of anti-cancer chemotherapeutic drugs, small molecules, peptides and proteins conjugated-ELP as drug delivery in treatment of cancer with introducing soluble ELP Unimers, injectable ELP nanoparticles and ELP block copolymer nanoparticles. These promising approaches could open a way to introduce novel strategies to combat various types of cancer.
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