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Overview

Immunotherapies have advanced the clinical treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases, but there remain significant challenges in developing effective and safe therapies for a broad patient. In nature, immune cells frequently communicate with other cell types and acutely sense surrounding signals to decide their fate and phenotype to elicit protection and maintain homeostasis.

We engineer biomaterials with precise chemical and physical signals to stimulate immune cells and mimic natural cell-cell communications, thereby obtaining a facile control of immune cell fates and phenotypes that excel in the local disease environment. We also aim to develop in vitro tumor/organoid models with spatially precise signals to study immune cell infiltration, which facilitates further engineering designs.

We utilize multidisciplinary approaches which include precision materials engineering & bioconjugation, synthetic biology, super-resolution imaging, gene editing, and in vivo modeling.