J Appl Biomed 8:159-167, 2010 | DOI: 10.2478/v10136-009-0019-3

Membrane-active peptides as anti-infectious agents

Luis Rivas^1,*, Juan Román Luque-Ortega¹, María Fernández-Reyes¹, David Andreu²

¹ Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas - CSIC, Department of Physico Chemical Biology CSIC, Madrid, Spain

² Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Experimental and Health Sciences, Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, Barcelona, Spain

The lipid components of pathogen cell membranes have been considered as a poor pharmacological target, due to their universal distribution and apparent homogeneity throughout living organisms. Among the rare exceptions to this view one could mention polyene antibiotics such as amphotericin, or peptide antibiotics such as the polymyxins and the gramicidins. In the last two decades, however, the above notion has been challenged by two main lines of discovery; first, natural antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) that kill pathogens by interaction with phospholipids and membrane permeabilization, and secondly, cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs), capable of introducing into cells a variety of cargoes in the absence of specific receptors, again by interaction at some point with membrane phospholipids. For both AMPs and CPPs, the pharmacological proof-of-concept has been successfully demonstrated, and promising applications as nanobiotechnological tools have been envisaged though not hitherto materialized in clinical settings. In this review we briefly examine the pros and cons of these two classes of therapeutic agents, as well as strategies aimed at rationalizing and expanding their potentiality.

Keywords: membrane; cell-penetrating peptide; antimicrobial peptide; antibiotic resistance; infectious disease

Received: March 15, 2010; Revised: April 23, 2010; Published: July 31, 2010  Show citation