Chemical Nanoengineering: Designing Drugs Controlled by Light

The scientific cooperation between chemists, biotechnologists and physicists from various Catalan institutes, headed by Pau Gorostiza, from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), and Ernest Giralt, from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), has led to a breakthrough that will favor the development of light-regulated therapeutic molecules.

The "Design, synthesis and structure of peptides and proteins" lab headed by E. Giralt has synthesized two peptides (small proteins), which, on irradiation with light, change shape, thereby allowing or preventing an specific protein-protein interaction. The association of these two proteins is required for endocytosis, a process by which cells allow molecules to cross the cell membrane and enter.

"Photo-sensitive peptides act like traffic lights and can be made to give a green or red light for cell endocytosis. They are powerful tools for cell biology," explains Dr. Giralt. "These molecules allow us to use focalized light like a magic wand to control biological processes and to study them," adds the physicist Pau Gorostiza, ICREA professor, and head of the "Nanoprobes and nanoswitches" lab at IBEC.

In this context, photo-sensitive peptides will allow the manipulation of the complex development of a multicellular organism by means of light patterns. " In view of the results, we are now working towards a general recipe to design photo-switchable inhibitory peptides that can be used to manipulate other protein-protein interactions inside cells by applying light," explain the researchers.