Organ-Targeted Drug Delivery

The selective effect of potential drugs plays a crucial role in their development. The idea is that the substance should be active specifically in the target tissue. For example, due to the non-specific effect of chemotherapeutics in cancer therapy, there are severe side effects, which makes the healing process even more difficult. The treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's is limited by the impermeability of the blood-brain barrier for the most drugs. For these reasons, organ targeting is an urgent topic of current medical research. Our research group is currently focussed on combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput screening of cell-penetrating peptoids (CPPos). These are mimetics of the already established cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs), but show much higher bioavailability due to their structure. The CPPos could be used for transport of low-molecular-weight active substances tissue-specifically into the cell. Furthermore, our group is working on metal-based nanoscale systems for drug delivery, which also have photoactivatable properties that could be used in photodynamic cancer therapy.