Abstract

Cancer treatments have traditionally entailed system wide toxicity with debilitating side effects for the patient. The demand for targeted therapies is clearly exhibited in the pipeline of large pharmaceuticals where the need to identify delivery vehicles that offer the prospects of more targeted, efficacious treatments with fewer side effects is paramount. Historically a number of technologies have been tried and tested including antibody drug conjugates, nanoparticles, cell surface markers and targeting the tumor microenvironment. Unfortunately, these approaches have often had lackluster results and created alternative toxic profiles, such as immune activation. Interest in an historic technology, cell penetrating peptides (CPPs), has been recently reinvigorated, presenting the opportunity to deliver targeted, biologically active cargoes to cancerous cells for treatment without systemic side effects.