Peptides are short informational polymers made up of amino acids. They are increasingly viewed as building blocks to form discrete nanoscale objects, and/or self-assemble into nanostructured materials. With 20 naturally occurring amino acids, there is a large sequence and structural solution space for design and manufacture of peptide-based functional materials. Therefore, we carried out fundamental studies to extend our understanding of sequence-to-structure relationships in proteins, and potentially provide materials for applications in bionanotechnology.
Related to this research avenue, Dr David Wibowo was awarded a competitive Early Career Researcher Grant by Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (only awarded four annually). The grant will be used to develop innovative synthesis techniques to produce core-shell hybrid materials tailored for oral delivery of chemotherapy drugs. This will be achieved by combining bioengineering to produce biopolymers displaying functional peptides with bio-inspired chemical engineering to construct inorganics, leading to the formation of multifunctional inorganic shells that coat drug-loaded biopolymers.
Overview of the project is explained in the 3-minute video as follow.
Selected publications:
We aim to achieve scalable and sustainable manufacturing processes of functional biomaterials through integrated biomolecular and bioprocess engineering. By engineering microbial cell factories, we produced high-quality bio-based products, including particulate biopolymers for use as therapeutic carriers (1), antimicrobial pexiganan (2-4), biosurfactants for stabilisation of emulsions and foams (5), protein antigens for vaccines (6), and hyaluronan for wound healing (7).
Selected publications:
Our oil-core silica-shell hybrid nanoparticles were demonstrated able to encapsulate poorly-water-soluble pesticides, achieving high loading capacity, cargo-protection ability, and sustained-release properties (1-3). The capacity of these nanoparticles to release the encapsulated pesticidies in a sustained manner led to their use as effective delivery systems for eliminating termite colonies in both laboratory settings (3) and field trials (1).
Selected publications:
We aim to understand how physicochemical properties of our novel nanoparticles influence the nanoparticles' delivery performances toward tumours and cancer cells. In this regards, the physicochemical properties we investigated included materials that composed the nanoparticles (i.e. lipid, polymer and inorganics), as well as surface chemistries (i.e. passive- and active targeting) (4-6), drug-loading capacities (2) and stiffnesses (1, 3, 4) of the nanoparticles.
Selected publications: