"Molecular to Systemic Engineering of Immune Cells for Robust Immunotherapy"
Immunotherapy has achieved significant clinical progress for the treatment of cancer and other diseases over the past decade, but challenges including low patient responses, off-target side effects, and poor efficacy against solid tumors and autoimmune disorders remain. One of our research interests is to understand how immune cells (e.g., dendritic cells (DCs)) can be manipulated or engineered using chemistry, material, and chemical biology approaches, in order to develop effective therapies for cancer and other diseases. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts in molecular, systemic, and in situ engineering of DCs and further development of robust cancer vaccines. These include molecules and polymers that can interact with DC membrane and thus activate DCs, and macroporous materials that can actively recruit and program DCs in situ. I will then conclude my talk with several short stories along the line of metabolic glycan labeling, another key technology in my lab, regarding how we made it possible to precisely modulate cells that are historically challenging to engineer.
