Engineering of Self-Assembled Peptide Hydrogels for Antitumor Therapy

Abstract

Cancer causes more than 8 million of deaths worldwide annually. To combat cancer, chemotherapy is one of the most effective strategies till date. However, chemotherapy often affects healthy cells due to the non-specific toxicity. To overcome the shortcomings, nanomaterial based therapy has been introduced for anticancer therapy. Recently, hydrogel, one of the most effective nanomaterials with versatile applications has been sought significant attention in the field of biomedical sciences. Peptide based hydrogels are identified as promiscuous biomaterial for their biocompatibility and biodegradability. Currently, self-assembled peptide hydrogels have been acknowledged as potential candidates for cancer therapy. Moreover, due to the stimuli-responsiveness (pH, ALP and GSH) of peptide based hydrogels, they have shown potentiality in the tumour microenvironment (TME) during anticancer therapy. These hydrogels could be categorized according to their mode of activity namely, anticancer drug loaded or conjugated peptide hydrogel, enzyme-instructed peptide hydrogel and photosensitizer encapsulated peptide hydrogel against cancer. In this chapter, we have discussed about all the categories of peptide based hydrogels mentioned above for the anticancer therapy. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.