Professor Ruibing Wang, State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences & Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR

Supramolecularly Engineered Cells for Targeted Therapy

Cells are a basic unit of living organisms and using them as drug carriers or therapeutics has unique advantages. During the past several years, we have developed a unique “supramolecular cell engineering” approach where nanomedicines or biomaterials are self-assembled either extracellularly or intracellularly via artificial host-guest interactions, to anchor nanomedicine or biomaterials either on the surface of, or inside, the cells for targeted delivery to specific tissues, e.g. driven by the inflammatory tropism of immune cells.¹ We show that the engineered cells may efficiently deliver medicine to disease tissues and effectively treat several diseases including acute pneumonia² and solid tumors.³ We also show that intracellularly gelated macrophage may function as “cell sponge” to absorb inflammatory cytokines, endotoxins and even bacteria, to effectively fight against infectious diseases.^4,5

References
[1] Wang, R. et al, Nat. Commun. 2020, 11: 2622.
[2] Wang, R. et al, Adv. Mater. 2023, 35: 202211626.
[3] Wang, R. et al, Sci. Adv. 2022, 8: eabn1805. 
[4] Wang, R. et al, Matter, 2023, 6: 3889.
[5] Wang, R. et al, Nat. Commun. 2024, 15: 328.

Author’s BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Ruibing Wang is currently Professor of Supramolecular Pharmaceutics at University of Macau. He obtained his BSc and PhD degrees from Jilin University and Queen’s University, Canada, respectively, and has become an elected Fellow, the Royal Society of Chemistry since 2020. Prof. Wang’s research interest is supramolecular biomaterials, and cell-mimetic and cell-based pharmaceutics. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed research papers on Nature Commun., Sci. Adv., Matter, JACS, Angew, Adv. Mater., Mater. Today etc, with a total citation of over 10,000 times and H-index of 57. He has won several prestigious awards including 2018 Macao Science and Technology Award - Natural Science Award, 2019 UM Teaching Excellence Award, 2020 Macau Science and Technology Award - Technological Invention Award, and 2022 Macau Science and Technology Award – Natural Science Award.  He is among the list of Stanford’s World's Top 2% Scientists. He actively serves in the editorial boards of Chin. Chem. Lett., Supramol. Mater., and ACS App. Bio Mater., he is also a council member of Supramolecular Chemistry Advisory Committee of Chinese Chemical Society.