Claudins are considerably expressed on tumor cells and mucosal epithelium cells, thus they have been explored for targeting delivery in tumor therapy and mucosal vaccination.
The unique triple helical structure of collagen has been explored for targeting collagen strands, and for engineering collagen-like functional assemblies and conjugates.
Several approaches have been explored for targeting Ras directly by designing drugs that prevent the post-translational modifications required for the insertion of Ras into the plasma membrane.
Various agents that can be used or are currently being explored for targeting tumours are folic acid (Mohapatra et al. 2007; Sudimack and Lee 2000), Arginine Glycine Aspartic acid (RGD) peptides (Lee et al. 2009; Su et al. 2002; Montet et al. 2006; Xie et al. 2008; Lee et al. 2008), chlorotoxin (Sun et al. 2008) and various antibody conjugates.
Many receptors on the mucosal epithelial cells, M cells and APCs have been explored for vaccine target-delivery with antigens co-delivered with specific receptor-binding ligands, such as lectins, bacterial adhesins, bacterial toxins, PAMPs, other M-cell targeting ligands, antibodies and Fcs (Takahashi, 2003; Sneh-Edri et al., 2011; Cruz et al., 2012; Devriendt et al., 2012).
Nanoparticles have been explored for controlled and target-specific delivery of the drug that can transport across the BBB and increase the uptake of suitable drugs in the brain.
Having only been explored for confirming predicted miRNA targets [ 24, 25] or extracting tumor-classifying molecular signatures [ 26], these parallel expression datasets have far more potential to be exploited.
Targeting the sterol biosynthesis pathway has been explored for the development of new bioactive compounds.
Targeting of IL2R has subsequently been explored for its therapeutic potential as well as to help elucidate signal transduction pathways.
