Selective Drug Delivery to Cancer Cells Only... "900 Times Stronger Binding"

KAIST Research Team Develops Drug Delivery Technology

Domestic researchers have developed a drug delivery technology that can accurately deliver anticancer drugs only to cancer cells. It was found to have a binding strength more than 900 times stronger than existing methods, effectively killing cancer cells.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced on the 14th that Professor Hak-Sung Kim's research team in the Department of Biological Sciences developed a clathrin assembly that can specifically deliver drugs to cancer cells.

This study was published in the international academic journal Small, Volume 19, Issue 8, on the 22nd of last month, and was selected as the cover paper. Photo by KAIST

To treat cancer effectively without side effects, technology that can specifically deliver drugs to cancer cells is necessary. Protein assemblies, composed of proteins, are widely used for drug delivery in cancer treatment. To use protein assemblies for drug delivery, a functionalization technology that effectively conjugates proteins recognizing cancer cells and drugs that kill cancer cells to the protein assembly is essential. However, in the case of protein assemblies, the functionalization process is very complex, inefficient, and mostly limited to small chemical drugs, which imposed many practical limitations.

Clathrin, a protein assembly in vivo, self-assembles inside cells and efficiently transports substances via endocytosis. The clathrin assembly is first formed by the binding of three heavy chains and three light chains to create a triskelion, which then self-assembles. Inspired by this, the research team designed clathrin chains to facilitate the functionalization of cancer cell recognition proteins and toxin proteins for specific drug delivery to cancer cells, resulting in a new form of clathrin assembly.

The developed clathrin assembly can simultaneously conjugate two types of proteins (cancer cell recognition protein and toxin protein) with high efficiency through a one-pot reaction, and it is expected to be widely used in biomedical fields including drug delivery, vaccine development, and disease diagnosis.

Schematic diagram of clathrin assembly developed by the research team. Image courtesy of KAIST

In this study, a protein recognizing the representative tumor marker epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) was used to specifically deliver drugs to cancer cells. The clathrin assembly functionalized with the EGFR-recognizing protein showed a binding strength more than 900 times higher than existing methods due to the avidity effect. Based on this, the research team confirmed that when the clathrin assembly linked with toxin protein was applied to cells, it had no effect on normal cells but effectively killed only cancer cells.

The research results were published as a cover paper in the international journal Small, Volume 19, Issue 8, on the 22nd of last month.

Dr. Hong-Sik Kim, the first author, said, "Clathrin has been difficult to functionalize and its practical application was limited because it was extracted from mammalian cells. The newly designed clathrin assembly in this study can be functionalized with two different proteins in a single reaction and can be produced in Escherichia coli, making it a protein assembly application technology that can be widely used in the biomedical field."

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