'Needle Phobia'?... Technology That Greatly Reduces the Number of Injections Emerges

Revolutionary Extension of Protein Drug Efficacy Duration
Research Team of Professor Inchan Kwon at GIST and Professor Jaeyoon Kim at Sungkyunkwan University

"An injection that was given once a day can now be administered once a week." Recently, actor Yoo Ah-in's reason for propofol administration, 'needle phobia,' has become a topic of public interest. He claimed that he was prescribed treatment every time due to his fear of needles. In fact, many people, regardless of age, experience fear of injections. A domestic research team has developed a technology that can drastically reduce the number of injections for patients requiring long-term treatment.

Injection. Archive photo. [Image source=Yonhap News]

The National Research Foundation of Korea announced on the 7th that Professor Kwon In-chan's research team from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), in collaboration with Professor Kim Jae-yoon's team from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University, designed charge-amplifying peptide fragments that regulate the electrostatic interactions between protein drugs and drug delivery systems. This is a groundbreaking platform technology that can easily control the duration of protein drug efficacy.

Protein drugs are used to treat many diseases due to their excellent substrate characteristics, but once injected into the body, they are rapidly degraded, making it difficult to maintain their efficacy, thus requiring repeated excessive administration. Hydrogels are often used as drug delivery systems; however, depending on the type of drug, if the interaction between the protein and the hydrogel is weak, the drug release rate in the body is fast, limiting the expected duration of efficacy. Therefore, the development of platform technology to enhance these interactions was necessary.

The research team aimed to regulate the charge of the drug using peptides that can be easily fused to protein drugs and to control the electrostatic interactions between the drug and the drug delivery system. To this end, they designed positively charged amplifying peptides and negatively charged amplifying peptides. When tested on protein drugs for gout treatment using these designed charge-amplifying peptides, it was possible to significantly increase or decrease the charge of the protein drug by fusion without additional chemical reactions.

A domestic research team developed a platform technology that significantly extends the efficacy duration of protein drugs, which was published in December last year in Advanced Functional Materials.

When these protein drug variants were injected into positively charged hydrogels to observe the release rate, it was confirmed that the drug release rate changed according to the magnitude of the protein drug's charge. In animal experiments under the same conditions, the in vivo half-life, which was about 3 hours previously, was greatly extended to more than 4 days, and the main efficacy was maintained even 4 days after drug administration.

The developed charge peptide fragments are produced using recombinant protein technology, allowing their use during drug manufacturing without additional reactions or purification. The experiments also confirmed the potential of this platform technology to be applied to various types of protein drugs and drug delivery systems.

Professor Kwon In-chan stated, "The peptide fragments developed this time enable the control of the in vivo half-life of protein drugs through simple fusion, and it is expected to contribute to the commercialization of various protein drugs."

The research results were published online on December 27 last year in the international materials science journal Advanced Functional Materials.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.