Antibodies/Proteins crossing BBB and the plasma membrane has...

Antibodies/Proteins crossing BBB and the plasma membrane has been a hot topic of  antibody-based therapeutics community.

http://www.antibodysociety.org/word...017-Ab-Eng_Therapeutics-session-summaries.pdf

"Antibody drug development is now a mature field with >60 marketed antibody therapeutics and hundreds more in clinical trials. Indeed, many of the more tractable and better understood targets for the treatment of human diseases have been extensively exploited for antibody drug development. This begs the question, where will new targets for future antibody drugs come from? One possible source of new targets for antibodies is in overcoming major delivery challenges that make some potential therapeutic targets challenging, if not impossible, to reach with conventional approaches."

"The first delivery obstacle is to facilitate protein transport across the so-called blood-brain barrier (BBB) that prevents free diffusion of macromolecules from the blood into the interstitial fluid of the brain. This is an urgent and important problem to solve, given the tens of millions of individuals worldwide who are afflicted with neurodegenerative diseases and the lack of disease-modifying therapies. Incurable forms of brain cancer also represent another major unmet medical need. The second delivery challenge is increasing the efficiency of delivery of protein drugs to the lung. Addressing this challenge may facilitate the treatment of a range of serious lung diseases including autoimmunity, inflammation and cancers. The third delivery challenge is the “holy grail” for protein therapeutics of enabling proteins to cross the plasma membrane for delivery in a functional form to the cytosol. More than half of the targets for current drugs are located inside cells and accessible only to small molecule drugs. Efficient targeted delivery of protein drugs to access intracellular targets may greatly expand therapeutic target space. For example, blocking of protein-protein interactions is often readily possible with proteins and usually much more difficult with small molecules."