Dan Shu
Ohio State University, OH·Biomedical Engineering
Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive breast cancer subtype that responds poorly to chemotherapy. RNA interference (RNAi) drugs could help: these are short RNA molecules, such as siRNA (small interfering RNA) and miRNA (microRNA), that switch off cancer-promoting genes.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Pharmacology
Biochemistry
- Topics
RNA nanotechnology
exosomes
siRNA
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Build and evaluate exosome–RNA nanoparticle complexes carrying TNBC-targeting ligands, including RNA aptamers against EGFR, CD133, CD44 or nAHRs and the chemical ligand methotrexate, together with tumor-suppressing siRNA and miRNA cargo.
- Determine how these complexes enter triple negative breast cancer cells and traffic inside them, testing whether cargo reaches the cytosol by membrane fusion or is captured in endosomes after endocytosis.
- Characterize how the RNAi cargo is released and processed inside cells, using controlled loading of siRNA, suppressor miRNA and anti-oncogenic miRNA into exosomes.
- Measure pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, antitumor efficacy and safety of the therapeutic RNA nanoparticles in patient-derived xenograft mouse models to select a lead candidate.
More about the research
The hard part is delivery. Many carriers get trapped in endosomes, membrane bubbles inside the cell that hold and often degrade their contents, so the RNA never reaches the cytosol where it acts.
Why it matters
Patients with triple negative breast cancer have few effective options and poor prognoses. By working out how ligand-coated exosomes get RNA cargo into the cytosol of tumor cells, this work could yield a delivery platform for RNA-based treatments that spares healthy tissue, together with the efficacy and safety data needed to move a lead candidate toward clinical testing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Peixuan Guo
Ohio State University, OH·Pharmacology
Define the conditions for assembling the dCas9-HDAC1 fusion repressor with guide RNA or crRNA, including sequence and length requirements, that most effectively silence mutant KRAS and suppress colon cancer cells.
Yaguang Xi
University of Georgia, GA·Pharmacology
Determine how the oncogenic microRNA miR-10b and its target gene NR4A3 contribute to the experimental compound LG007's activity against triple-negative breast cancer.
Sanchita Bhatnagar
University of California-Davis, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Screen TRIM37 gene variants already identified in African American women for anoikis resistance, the ability of cancer cells to survive after detaching, and compare how risk and reference alleles of TRIM37 behave biologically.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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