Development of an Integrated Microfluidic Platform for the Identification of Therapeutic Peptides for Unmet Medical Needs

Pharmaceutical industries have recognised the importance of cell-permeable peptides to cure currently untreatable diseases. In fact, peptides can interact with targets that other type of molecules cannot, such as protein-protein interactions which play crucial roles in the generation and progression of many diseases. However, peptides also have major limitations that hamper their use as drugs. Among these is their inability to efficiently interact with intracellular targets leaving many unmet medical needs.
We propose to develop an integrated platform to generate and screen libraries of peptides to rapidly and cost-effectively identify new drugs for those untapped intracellular targets. In the first phase of the proposed research, we will focus our efforts on building such a platform, and in the second phase we will validate it using two different intracellular targets with relevance in cancer and cystic fibrosis.
A successful outcome to this project will result in a significant advance in the drug-discovery field as current peptide technologies can only access extracellular targets, ignoring those 75% located intracellularly. Therefore, our technology has the potential to provide patients with life-changing medicines for currently untreatable diseases or for diseases with limited therapeutic options available.