Dear Colleagues,

In the era of drug resistance (against bacteria and chemotherapeutics), membrane-active peptides play an important role in the design and development of new drugs.

Currently, chemotherapy is the prevailing therapeutic strategy for the systemic treatment of infections and cancer. Unfortunately, the inappropriate use of antibiotics is reducing their effectiveness by selecting highly resistant pathogens on the one hand, and on the other antiblastic chemotherapy is non-selective and causes many side effects on normal cells, particularly bone-marrow and high replicating tissues (including gastrointestinal tract and reproductive organs). Furthermore, anti-bacterial and antiblastic chemotherapeutic molecules induce and activate the expression of multi-drug resistance (MDR) reducing the activity of chemotherapeutic groups of drugs. The most relevant goal of the scientific community is to develop drugs that can specifically target or infected or neoplastic cells, with limited cytotoxicity on normal cells, as well as pathogens. Peptides can bind with high affinity membrane receptors activating molecular pathways or can be internalised by endocytic processes targeting cells expressing specific protein on their surface. Further changes of the leader sequence allow the entrance of peptides through the plasma membrane and their compartmentalization into the nuclear and/or the mitochondrial membrane inducing cancer cells apoptosis or cell cycle modulation, as well as cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) recognition. Such peptides can be also used for drug delivery. The main advantages of peptide-based drugs are the ease of development, low costs, the possibility of increasing the chemical-physical and enzymatic stability, mainly related to the conformation and the amino acid composition, respectively.

To broaden the number of peptide applications of the current special issue, several topics will be considered including antimicrobial peptides, cell penetrating peptides, anticancer peptides, glycopeptides, membrane-acting peptides, interfering peptides, peptides mimotopes of oncoprotein, peptide-driven cellular immunity. Authors are invited to submit their latest results. Both original papers and reviews are welcome.

Dr. Anna Lucia Tornesello
Dr. Franco M. Buonaguro
Guest Editors

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• anticancer peptides
• bioactive peptides
• cell penetrating peptides
• antimicrobial peptides
• cells membrane
• membrane models
• membrane translocating peptides
• membrane-active proteins
• radiolabeled peptides
• nanocarriers
• theranostics
• peptide-dependent cellular immunity