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Drug delivery gets subcellular

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Therapies that target mitochondria and other organelles are being put to test in the clinic.

By

  1. Katherine Bourzac

    1. Katherine Bourzac is a freelance journalist in San Francisco, California.

Pharmacologist Hazel Szeto was hoping to discover a new painkiller. In 2004, while working at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, she found a small peptide secreted by frogs that was a terrific analgesic. But this peptide had another characteristic that changed the course of Szeto’s research entirely: it accumulated in mitochondria, the organelles that supply cells with chemical energy1.

Nature 657, S14-S15 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02659-2

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Drug delivery, a supplement produced with financial support from Taiho Oncology, Inc. Nature maintains full independence in all editorial decisions related to the content. About this content.

References

  1. Zhao, K. et al. J. Biol. Chem. 279, 34682–34690 (2004).

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  2. D’Souza, G. G. M., Boddapati, S. V. & Weissig, V. Mitochondrion 5, 352–358 (2005).

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  3. Brangwynne, C. P. et al. Science 324, 1729–1732 (2009).

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  4. Klein, I. A. et al. Science 368, 1386–1392 (2020).

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