Abstract
Cancer became a major concern with human morbidity and mortality worldwide, therefore many strategies have been applied to combat the propagation of cancer cells and their elevated growth such as chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. Cell-penetrating peptides, CPPs, are useful vectors for the delivery of therapeutic agents such as drugs, siRNA, splice-correcting oligonucleotides, proteins, and plasmids. This project will focus on the design and synthesis of new cell-penetrating peptides obtained by performing chemical modifications of well known antimicrobial peptides. The CPPs will be non-covalently conjugated with different established drugs to obtain stable complexes to study the cellular uptake and pharmacological effects in relevant biological systems. The project aims to develop suitable methods for cell delivery of drugs with high specificity for cell/tissue cancer phenotypes. This project has a strong multidisciplinary character which falls into a special important area of science since it brings together a wide area of expertise including peptide/organic chemistry, molecular biology, cell biology.