Lectin Nanoconjugates for Targeted Therapeutic Applications

Abstract

Lectins are defined as a group of nonimmune proteins present mostly in plants (and also in some animals and microorganisms) that are known to bind with carbohydrates (mono- and oligosaccharides) with reversible and specific protein/animal cell agglutinating properties. These proteins are present in sufficient amounts to perform various crucial biological functions, viz., plants for defense, adhesion in bacteria, and in case of animals, binding of different proteins. Due to the efficiency and specificity of lectins to bind with carbohydrates, these are mostly used for various biomedical applications. Different types of carbohydrates get overexpressed in a number of diseases, ultimately acting as biomarkers for those diseases to be detected by the lectins. For getting better output, lectins are conjugated with materials that would provide a base for lectin’s efficacy enhancement. After binding to a specific material, the randomness of the molecule gets decreased, which leads to an increase in the proficiency of the biomolecule. For this purpose, nanoparticles (NPs) act as the best platform for lectin conjugation. In general, the conjugation between the NPs and lectins takes place via covalent and non-covalent binding. All these linkages are preferably used in the binding strategies of these moieties. This binding of lectins to NPs helps to increase the specific targeting ability of the NPs by avoiding any nonspecific interaction. Due to higher specificity, NP-lectin conjugates find enormous applications in biomedical fields. In this chapter, we have tried to provide recent developments about these newly emerged nanoconjugates. A brief discussion is given on different lectin-NP conjugation techniques and its characterization followed by their biomedical applications.