BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Peptide scaffolds for VEGF delivery

September 6, 2012 7:00 AM UTC

The clinical development of VEGF-based strategies to treat ischemic cardiovascular diseases, first proposed over 10 years ago, has been challenging due to the difficulty of maintaining local VEGF concentrations at therapeutic levels.1,2 Researchers at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan have developed a potential solution to the problem-an injectable self-assembling peptide nanofiber scaffold that enables sustained VEGF delivery and establishes a microenvironment that augments arteriogenesis and cardiac repair following myocardial infarction.3 The group is evaluating the scaffold in porcine studies and hopes to submit an IND in two to three years.

Patrick Hsieh, an associate professor at the Institute of Clinical Medicine at the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), said clinical trials of VEGF-based strategies to treat cardiovascular diseases have primarily relied on infusion of the protein itself or gene delivery and have not shown convincing evidence of therapeutic efficacy...