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Peptide-based liquid droplets as emerging delivery vehicles

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Peptides are small yet versatile building blocks of biomaterials. This Comment highlights recent progress in the design of liquid-like microdroplets, or coacervates, based on peptides and produced through liquid–liquid phase separation. This emerging platform holds promise as efficacious delivery vehicles for multi-purpose biomedical applications.

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Fig. 1: Peptide-based microdroplets.

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Acknowledgements

E.S. acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council (ERC) through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 851963). A.M. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) through an Academic Research (AcRF) Tier 3 grant (grant no. MOE 2019-T3-1-012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Jianhui Liu

  2. The Forsyth Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Jianhui Liu

  3. Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston, MA, USA

    Jianhui Liu

  4. Institute for Molecules and Materials, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

    Evan Spruijt

  5. Biological and Biomimetic Material Laboratory, Center for Sustainable Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Ali Miserez

  6. School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Ali Miserez

  7. David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Robert Langer

  8. Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Robert Langer

  9. Department of Surgery, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Robert Langer

  10. Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Robert Langer

  11. Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Robert Langer

Authors
  1. Jianhui Liu
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  2. Evan Spruijt
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  3. Ali Miserez
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  4. Robert Langer
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jianhui Liu, Evan Spruijt, Ali Miserez or Robert Langer.

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Liu, J., Spruijt, E., Miserez, A. et al. Peptide-based liquid droplets as emerging delivery vehicles. Nat Rev Mater 8, 139–141 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-022-00528-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-022-00528-8

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