Design and Modification of Anticancer Peptides

Cancer is a great concern in the public health and development of novel therapeutic agent or strategy become urgently. Anticancer peptides (ACPs) have become promising anticancer drug candidate molecules due to their several extraordinary properties, such as small size, high activity, low immunogenicity, good biocompatibility, diversity of sequence and more modification sites for the functional molecules. However, the low stability and short half-life of peptides are the major barriers for the application. In this review, we focus on the methods of peptide design and modification to improve the stability, half-life time and specificity of ACPs, which including amino acid substitution, cyclization, hybridization, fragmentization, modification of Cand N-terminal of peptide by polymer or targeting molecules, etc. modification of Cand N-terminal of peptide by polymer or targeting molecules, etc. The schematic diagram of major design and modification strategies of ACPs are shown in Figure 1.