Haijun Yu

Haijun Yu, Ph.D.
Professor, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica,
Chinese Academy of Sciences
hjyu@simm.ac.cn

Biography: 
Haijun Yu is a P.I. and professor of pharmaceutics and in Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. from Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. After postdoc training at Ludwig-Maximillians University (Germany), UTSouthwestern Medical Centre at Dallas (USA) and Tohoku University (Japan), he was appointed as a staff member at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2012, thereafter was promoted to a professor of pharmaceutics in 2016. He is engaged in non-viral gene delivery, stimuli-responsive drug delivery systems and cancer immunotherapy. He has authorized 90 publications including Nat Commun, Sci Immunol, Adv Mater and so on.

Topic title:Stimuli-activatable Prodrug Nanoparticles for Cancer Immunotherapy
Abstract:Immunotherapy has emerged as a promising clinical modality for cancer therapy due to its ability to initiate an antitumor immune response. However, current immunotherapy is severely impaired by immunosuppression of host T-cell antitumor activity through the programmed cell death 1 ligand (PD-L1) and programmed cell death receptor 1 (PD-1) (PD-L1/PD-1) immune checkpoint or IDO-1. For instance, we had developed a tumor acidity and reduction microenvironment dual-activatable binary cooperative prodrug nanoparticle (termed as BCPN) for immunotherapy (Figure 1). BCPN was prepared by self-assemble of a polyethylene glycol (PEG)-grafted OXA prodrug and a disulfide bond-crosslinked homodimer of NLG919. In comparison of the previously reported nanovectors, BCPN is of several unique advantages for cancer immunotherapy. First, BCPN displays high drug encapsulation efficacy and tunable drug loading ratios by simply adjusting the feeding ratios of two prodrugs. Second, the PEGylated OXA prodrug is of superior sensitivity to the extracellular acidic pH of tumor. Upon reaching the tumor acidic microenvironment, BCPN switches to a positive surface charge following cleavage of the PEG corona, thereby improving tumor penetration and cellular uptake. The OXA prodrug and NLG919 dimer can be activated in the reduction microenvironment of tumor cells to avoid side effects.

 

Figure 1. Schematic illustration of prodrug nanoparticles for immunotherapy of cancer.

Acknowledgements: Financial supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31671024, 31622025 and 81521005) are gratefully acknowledged.

Reference

1. F Zhou, B Feng, H Yu, D Wang, T Wang, Y Ma, S Wang, Y Li, Tumor microenvironment-activatable prodrug vesicles for nano-enabled cancer immunotherapy combining immunogenic cell death induction and CD47 blockade. Adv Mater. 2018, 1805888.

2. D Wang, T Wang, H Yu, B Feng, L Zhou, F Zhou, B Hou, H Zhang, M Luo, Y Li. Engineered antibody nanoparticles overcome immunological tolerance to PD-L1 blockade therapy. Sci Immunol, 4 (2019), eaau6584.

3. B Feng, F Zhou, B Hou, D Wang, T Wang, Y Fu, Y Ma, H Yu, Y Li. Binary cooperative prodrug nanoparticles improve immunotherapy by synergistically modulating immune tumor microenvironment. Adv Mater. 2018, 1803001.  


Key Dates
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Deadline for Submission of Abstract:

October 31, 2019

Notification of abstract acceptance:
November 15, 2019




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