Hongbo Zhang

Åbo Akademi University, Finland

Title: Functional Materials for Precision Medication

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Biography

Dr. Hongbo Zhang has multidisciplinary background in pharmacy, biology and biomedical engineering. He did his Postdoc in Harvard University and establish his research group in 09.2016. He has accumulated experiences in microfluidics, nanotechnology, electrospinning, 3D printing and he aims to develop novel and effective solutions for the challenging biological and clinical problems. In most of the projects, the clinical doctors are involved. The projects start from a clinical problem, and Dr. Zhang will use the toolbox that his group has, to assemble a therapeutical nanoparticle/microparticle/scaffold or the combination of them. In last 5-year time, he has published 90 papers with total impact factor of 900, the 5-year citation is 3100, 5-year H-index is 35. 

Abstract

Nanotechnology has provided revolutionary impacts for the traditional medication. The nanometer size is highly relevant to many biological conditions, for example 50-200 nm particles tend to accumulate in tumor tissue due to the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect. Moreover, the nanoparticles can be endowed with character of smart, responsive, targeted, and multi-functional properties. Nanotechnology has also shown its capability on drug delivery, including the delivery of small molecular drugs, plasmid, nuclear acids, proteins and cells. Our group synthesize all kinds of nanomaterials, and we are especially interested in mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN), the metal organic framework (MOF), synthetic and nature polymers, DNA nanoparticles and etc. We also apply microfluidic technology for nanoparticles and microparticles fabrication. Moreover, we use electrospinning to produce nanofiber-based scaffolds. Here we present the examples on how we utilized nanotechnology to delivery small molecular drug and drug combinations, CRISPR/Cas9 plasmids, protein kinase A (PKA) protein, stem cells and etc. We found that those systems have greatly contributed the cancer treatment, cardiovascular diseases, wound healing etc. We collaborate with clinical doctors and we hope very much that we will find hints from those projects on the clinical translational potential.