Engineered Cyclic Peptides

Abstract

An engineered cyclic peptide provides structural constraints to resist non-specific degradation in the human body and includes environment-specific cleavage sites to allow release of a linearized peptide upon reaching a target environment. The linearized peptide can include a reporter molecule or a bioactive therapeutic such that the cyclic peptide is essentially inactive at administration and in circulation but becomes reactive only upon exposure to target-specific environmental factors such as a specific combination of differentially-expressed proteases associated with a target tissue or disease state. The peptides can include tuning that modulate distribution by targeting the particle to specific tissue, bodily fluids, or cell types.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.