Xiaoyuan Yang,Xuelin Xia,Xiao-Xia Xia,Zhao Sun,Deyue Yan
Tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis ligand (TRAIL) is a promising protein candidate for selective apoptosis of a variety of cancer cells. However, the short half-life and a lack of targeted delivery are major obstacles for its application in cancer therapy. Here, we propose a simple strategy to solve the targeting problem by genetically fusing an anti-HER2 affibody to the C-terminus of the TRAIL. The fusion protein TRAIL-affibody was produced as a soluble form with high yield in recombinant Escherichia coli. In vitro studies proved that the affibody domain promoted the cellular uptake of the fusion protein in the HER2 overexpressed SKOV-3 cells and improved its apoptosis-inducing ability. In addition, the fusion protein exhibited higher accumulation at the tumor site and greater antitumor effect than those of TRAIL in vivo, indicating that the affibody promoted the tumor homing of the TRAIL and then improved the therapeutic efficacy. Importantly, repeated injection of high-dose TRAIL-affibody showed no obvious toxicity in mice. These results demonstrated that the engineered TRAIL-affibody is promising to be a highly tumor-specific and targeted cancer therapeutic agent.
Protein immobilization is critical to utilize their unique functions in diverse applications. Herein, we report that orthogonal peptide–protein chemistry enabled multilayer construction can facilitate the incorporation of various folded structural domains, including calmodulin in different states, affibody, and dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). An extended conformation is found to be the most advantageous for steady film growth. The resulting protein thin films exhibit sensitive and selective responsive behaviors to biosignals, such as Ca2+, trifluoperazine, and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH), and fully maintain the catalytic activity of DHFR. The approach is applicable to different substrates such as hydrophobic gold and hydrophilic silica microparticles. The DHFR enzyme can be immobilized onto silica microparticles with tunable amounts. The multilayer setup exhibits a synergistic enhancement of DHFR activity with increasing numbers of bilayers and also makes the embedded DHFR more resilient to lyophilization. Therefore, this is a convenient and versatile method for protein immobilization with potential benefits of synergistic enhancement in enzyme performance and resilience.