Nanotherapeutics and Nanovaccines for the Treatment of Bacterial Infection
Liangfang Zhang, Professor
Department of Nanoengineering and Moores Cancer Center,
University of California, San Diego
Abstract:
The persistent threat of antibiotics-resistant bacterial infections poses great challenges to the public health and demands bold and innovative approaches for disease treatment and prevention. The pipeline of new antimicrobial drugs has failed to keep pace with the rise of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. To address the waning effectiveness of classical antibiotics treatments, anti-virulence therapies and vaccines, which aim to disarm pathogens of their virulence factors, are becoming compelling strategies against antimicrobial resistance. Herein, I report a broadly applicable, toxin-absorbing nanoparticle platform (also called “toxin nanosponge”) as a new virulence factor-based therapeutic candidate against invasive bacterial infections. Consisting of a polymeric nanoparticle core wrapped by natural cell membranes, the toxin nanosponge functions as a decoy to absorb and neutralize various types of pore-forming toxins secreted by pathogenic bacteria and thus divert the toxins away from natural target cells. The toxin nanosponge technique also reduces the selective pressure for further antibiotic resistance because the technology is designed to “disarm” bacteria and then let the immune cells to take over the powerless pathogens; thereby no antibiotics are involved in the treatment.
Biography:
Dr. Liangfang Zhang received his B.E. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Steve Granick. He was a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Prof. Robert Langer at MIT during 2006-2008. He joined the Department of Nanoengineering at UC San Diego as an Assistant Professor in July 2008 and was promoted to an Associate Professor with tenure in March 2012 and to Professor in July 2014. Dr. Zhang’s research interests focus on biomimetic nanomedicine, with a particular interest in creating and evaluating nanostructured biomaterials for drug delivery, detoxification and vaccination for treatment of infectious diseases and cancer. He has published 132 peer-reviewed articles and holds 51 issued/pending patents. He received the ACS Victor K. LaMer Award (2009), UCSD Best Teacher Award (2011), ACS Unilever Award (2012), MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Innovator Award (2013), AIChE Allan P. Colburn Award (2014), AIMBE Fellow (2015), and Popular Science’s Brilliant 10 Award (2016).
http://nano.ucsd.edu/~l7zhang/
Time: Mar. 7th, 2017, 16:30-17:30 pm
Venue: New Biology Building, Room 143
Host: Dr. Weiping Gao
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