Review Article Peptide-Based Treatment: A Promising Cancer Therapy

Copyright © 2015 Yu-Feng Xiao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Many new therapies are currently being used to treat cancer. Among these newmethods, chemotherapy based on peptides has been of great interest due to the unique advantages of peptides, such as a low molecular weight, the ability to specifically target tumor cells, and low toxicity in normal tissues. In treating cancer, peptide-based chemotherapy can be mainly divided into three types, peptide-alone therapy, peptide vaccines, and peptide-conjugated nanomaterials. Peptide-alone therapy may specifically enhance the immune system’s response to kill tumor cells. Peptide-based vaccines have been used in advanced cancers to improve patients’ overall survival. Additionally, the combination of peptides with nanomaterials expands the therapeutic ability of peptides to treat cancer by enhancing drug delivery and sensitivity. In this review, wemainly focus on the new advances in the application of peptides in treating cancer in recent years, including diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. 1