Central nervous system disorders constitute a major global public health burden, contributing substantially to morbidity and mortality. Advances in elucidating their underlying pathogenesis have facilitated the approval of an increasing number of proprietary drugs for clinical management of neurological conditions. A critical challenge in drug delivery lies in achieving appropriate tissue distribution, particularly within the brain, where effective therapeutic intervention requires traversing the blood-brain barrier and precisely targeting localized regions. Nanodelivery systems have emerged as a promising approach in biomedicine to address these challenges. Among these, peptides—characterized by their high specificity and relatively small size—are extensively employed to functionalize nanocarriers, thereby enhancing targeted tissue distribution. The conjugation of diverse functional peptides onto heterogeneous nanoscale carriers enables precise, efficient, and multidimensional targeting. This review highlights several representative neurological diseases and systematically discusses strategies for peptide-based functionalization of nanocarriers tailored to these pathological contexts.

Due to its good water solubility, biocompatibility and reversible self-assembly property, ferritin has been widely used in the encapsulation and delivery of bioactive molecules. Benefiting from the inherent tumor-targeting feature, ferritin nanocavities loaded with drug molecules or nanoparticles can be used for cancer imaging, diagnosis and treatment. Scientists have made efforts to reconstruct ferritin nanocages to expanded the application of ferritin. In this paper, the structural characteristics of natural and manufactured ferritin molecules are summarized, and the recent progress in their application in the fields of bioactive molecule encapsulation, heavy metal detection and biomedicine is reviewed.