Bioinspired Nanomaterials Based Miniaturised Soft Robots for High Precision Regiospecific Drug Delivery to Malignant Tumou

Project Description: (maximum of 4,000 characters):

Cancer is one of the top global public health challenges, estimated to have caused 10M deaths (WHO 2020). Since mid-1900s, and throughout the years, standardised therapeutic protocols have been developed and evolved for the treatment of various types of cancers. Albeit, the severe off-site side effects remain as a major hurdle

against treatment efficiency and patient compliance, thanks to the cytotoxicity of the current clinically used chemotherapeutic protocols. Targeted small molecule drugs, such as protein kinas inhibitors, have shown a great potential to improve treatment efficacy while reducing side effects, as they are designed to selectively target aberrant activation of protein kinases associated with tumour growth in different cancer types.

Most of the developed protein kinase inhibitors suffer from poor bioavailability, which could jeopardise their clinical use, as extensive dosing is required to elicit the desirable clinical outcome. To overcome this hurdle, in this project, we propose developing an innovative strategy for the regiospecific localisation of protein kinase inhibitors in cancer tissues.

This will involve the engineering of bioinspired soft robots, using peptide-based soft bionanomaterials, that provide high precision localisation of protein kinase inhibitors, targeting MAPK pathway in colorectal cancer mucosa. Bottom-up molecular design of peptide nanomaterials will enable fine tunning of the material properties over the length scale, ranging from the physicochemical and morphological properties of the developed nanostructures to the mechanical properties of the fabricated soft materials.

The peptide nature of soft biomaterials imply safety for use in physiological systems, as these are biocompatible and exhibit low toxicity and immunogenicity profiles. Soft-bodied animals, such as snails, will be the source of inspiration for the designs of such peptide Soft Robots (SoRos) due to their unique form of slime-based locomotion. This locomotor mechanism, in fact, provides highly precise but low speed locomotion that is independent of substrate orientation and therefore will enable region specific sustained release of the drug cargo, enhancing bioavailability in difficult to access tumour tissue sites.