Tumor-Specific Antigen Delivery for T-cell Therapy via a pH-Sensitive Peptide Conjugate.

Identifying an optimal antigen for targeted cancer therapy is challenging as the antigen landscape on cancerous tissues mimics that of healthy tissues, with few unique tumor-specific antigens identified in individual patients. pH low insertion peptide (pHLIP) acts as a unique delivery platform that can specifically target the acidic microenvironment of tumors, sparing healthy tissue in the process. We developed a pHLIP-peptide conjugate to deliver the SIINFEKL peptide, an immunogenic fragment of ovalbumin (OVA), to tumor cells in vivo.

Complementary, Semiautomated Methods for Creating Multidimensional PEG-Based Biomaterials.

Tunable biomaterials that mimic selected features of the extracellular matrix (ECM) such as its stiffness, protein composition, and dimensionality are increasingly popular for studying how cells sense and respond to ECM cues. In the field, there exists a significant trade-off for how complex and how well these biomaterials represent the in vivo microenvironment versus how easy they are to make and how adaptable they are to automated fabrication techniques. To address this need to integrate more complex biomaterials design with high-throughput screening approaches, we present several methods to fabricate synthetic biomaterials in 96-well plates and demonstrate that they can be adapted to semiautomated liquid handling robotics.