Design of Cancer Targeting Therapeutic Micelles

Current cancer research focuses on the development of therapeutic methods to minimize harmful side-effects. One approach is to employ methods that specifically target tumors and avoid other healthy cells. We are pursuing this route by preparing peptide-amphiphile mixed micelles, composed of both targeting and apoptotic peptides. The peptide-amphiphile monomers are prepared by conjugating peptides and hydrophobic tails, via the thiol-ene click route. The amphiphathic nature of these molecules enables their self-assembly into micelles. In addition to preparing micelles we would also like to control the aggregation morphology. Peptide-amphiphiles commonly assembles into cylindrical micelles. By adapting the surfactant number theory, we hope to prepare spherical micelles by controlling the head-group area of the peptide-amphiphile monomers, for example by conjugating multiple peptides to a single tail. In recent we have investigated the conjugation of cysteine to allyl amine and diallyl amine functionalized palmitic acid. This effort will support for future work regarding the conjugation of cysteine containing peptides to –ene functionalized tails.