Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/21/2022
9:35 am - 10:30 am
Location
New Engineering Building – Room 201
Categories
Fan Zhang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics
Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Florida
Title: Nanomedicine-based approaches to address immune suppression and resistance
Abstract: Recent advances in immunotherapy have focused largely on drugs targeting adaptive immunity; however, only a small fraction of patients and diseases benefit from these approaches. Developing new approaches to modulate innate immunity can enhance current T-cell-based immunotherapeutic approaches by inducing a multilayered immune response. Nanotechnology-based approaches provide the opportunity to prime the immune response, due to the intrinsic properties of nanoscale materials to target both the disease regions and the immune cells there. In this presentation, he will introduce a few examples of how nanomedicine-based approaches can be used to address the suppressive tumor microenvironment and enhance the efficacy of current cancer immunotherapy. He will also cover his training trajectory which transitioned from engineering to medicine.
Bio: Dr. Fan Zhang is an assistant professor at the Department of Pharmaceutics, College of Pharmacy, University of Florida. He also holds an adjunct position at UF Chemical Engineering. Dr. Zhang leads a lab focuses on developing synthetic nanoplatforms to direct immune cells as ‘living therapeutics’, through genetically programming cellular functions or molecularly targeting stimulatory/inhibitory pathways. To this end, his lab integrates nanotechnology, immunology, synthetic biology, and clinically-relevant animal disease models to create novel nanotherapeutics for controlled modulation of the immune system.
