Benzaldehyde-tethered fluorous tags for cytosolic delivery of bioactive peptides

Development of intracellular delivery systems for bioactive peptides remains challenging. Herein, we report a facile strategy to address this issue by conjugating peptides with benzaldehyde-tethered fluorous tags to generate dynamic peptide amphiphiles via a hydrazone bond for efficient cytosolic delivery. Those dynamic peptide fluoroamphiphiles could self-assemble into nanoparticles that readily cross the cell membrane. Using this strategy, several bioactive peptides were efficiently internalized by cancer cells and released into the cytosol to exert their biological functions, which showed much higher efficacies than non-fluorous lipids and cell penetrating peptide decorated peptides. Moreover, the fluorous tagged proapoptotic peptide was able to efficiently inhibit tumor growth in vivo. This report provides a new family of fluorous tags based on benzaldehyde for efficient cytosolic peptide delivery.