| Details: |
Drug-development is the most challenging foot-step in modern drug discovery process. After finding the therapeutic efficacy of a drug or drug candidate successful implementation depends on the right developmental team work among chemists, biologists, bioinformatics, and medical doctors. However, therapeutic efficacy of a drug depends on its ability to overcome the biological barriers and reach the desired tissue and intracellular target sites. The biological barriers includes, for example cellular plasma membranes, blood-brain barriers (BBB), and nuclear membranes. It is generally known that the plasma membrane allows entrance only those molecules with an appropriate range of molecular size, polarity, and charge. Therefore, many well developed drug with promising in vitro activities fail to come up as a successful pharmaceutical agents. Therefore the production of suitable drug delivery vehicle or molecular transporters to overcome the biological barriers would highly desirable in drug development. In this context, a number of cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) derived from HIV-1 Tat protein have been extensively studied to improve the absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination (ADME) properties of poorly bio available drugs including small molecules. Drug delivery system particularly targeted drug delivery vector development towards diseased cells or tissues is an important and attractive area in biomedical of research. Next, exploration of a sensitive diagnostic nanoprobe especially towards the aim of point of care treatment is another challenging task for early and accurate detection of diseases which facilitates efficacious therapy and monitoring of therapeutic progression to reduce mortality and morbidity. In this regard, optical imaging technologies using nanomaterials such as gold or silver nanoparticles, iron oxide nanocrystals and quantum dots have successfully been applied for molecular diagnosis, in vivo imaging and drug delivery. In recent years, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technology invented to be most sensitive techniques among other optical imaging modalities as the signal intensity of molecular vibration enhanced 108 –1014 folds compare to simple Raman spectra. Our group has revealed a systematic and comprehensive screening and selection process to identify ultra sensitive and potential multiplexing-capable novel SERS nanotags for in vitro and in vivo imaging. As a practical application of the novel probes, we have successfully demonstrated by targeting specific cancer biomarkers e.g. EGFR and Her2, which are important candidates for cancer detection and therapy, e.g. breast, lung and cervical and prostate. |