Studies on anticancer activities of antimicrobial peptides.

By D. Hoskin, A. Ramamoorthy. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, 2008

1,271 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In spite of great advances in cancer therapy, there is considerable current interest in developing anticancer agents with a new mode of action because of the development of resistance by cancer cells towards current anticancer drugs. A growing number of studies have shown that some of the cationic antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are toxic to bacteria but not to normal mammalian cells, exhibit a broad spectrum of cytotoxic activity against cancer cells. Such studies have considerably enhanced the significance of AMPs, both synthetic and from natural sources, which have been of importance both for an increased understanding of the immune system and for their potential as clinical antibiotics. The electrostatic attraction between the negatively charged components of bacterial and cancer cells and the positively charged AMPs is believed to play a major role in the strong binding and selective disruption of bacterial and cancer cell membranes, respectively. However, it is unclear why some host defense peptides are able to kill cancer cells when others do not. In addition, it is not clear whether the molecular mechanism(s) underlying the antibacterial and anticancer activities of AMPs are the same or different. In this article, we review various studies on different AMPs that exhibit cytotoxic activity against cancer cells. The suitability of cancer cell-targeting AMPs as cancer therapeutics is also discussed.

Subfields: Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed7fbc9bef0e48df986c0b07a4205cc8ae0d540c

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Citations in the corpus

Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles: Synthesis, Antimicrobial Activity and Food Packaging Applications (2012, background): “Despite major advances in cancer therapy, there is considerable interest in the development of antitumor agents with a novel mode of action, since carcinogenic cells have shown the ability to develop resistance mechanisms to current chemotherapy (Hoskin & Ramamoorthy, 2008).”
Designing antimicrobial peptides: form follows function (2011, background): “Extensive research has led to the realization that these bioactive peptides do not merely act as direct antimicrobial agents but also represent important effectors and regulators of the innate immune system that are able to profoundly modulate the immune response through a range of activities, inclu”
Antimicrobial peptides: key components of the innate immune system (2012, background): “Until now, it is not very clear what factors are responsible for antitumor activity and whether the molecular mechanism(s) underlying the antibacterial and anticancer activities of AMPs are the same or not (Hoskin and Ramamoorthy, 2008; Schweizer, 2009).”
From antimicrobial to anticancer peptides. A review (2013, background): “These molecules are α-helical peptides with separate cationic and hydrophobic faces comprising 21–27 amino acid residues (Hoskin and Ramamoorthy, 2008).”
CancerPPD: a database of anticancer peptides and proteins (2014, background): “of biological membranes between normal and cancer cells (11,12).”