| abstract |
Disclosed are bipodal peptide binder (BPB) based cargo delivery systems wherein cargo is linked to a BPB for delivery into cells or to cell surfaces using target binding ability and specificity of the BPB. The BPB has a structure stabilizing region of parallel or antiparallel amino acid strands or a combination of these strands to induce interstrand non-covalent bonds. The BPB also has target binding regions I and II, each binding to each of both termini of the structure stabilizing region. The number of amino acid residues of regions I and II, respectively, are n and m. The BPB exhibits the K D value (dissociation constant) of a very low level (for example, nM level) and, therefore, exhibits very high affinity toward a biological target molecule. The BPB based cargo delivery system has applications in drugs, in vivo molecular imaging, in vitro cell imaging, drug delivery targeting and escort molecules. |