Zhenjia Wang
University at Buffalo, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Inflammation is the body's defense against injury and infection, but when it does not shut down properly it drives disease. In the lungs, runaway inflammation becomes acute lung injury and then acute respiratory distress syndrome, which kills 30-50% of patients and has no approved drug therapy beyond supportive ventilation and fluid management.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Pharmacology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
acute lung injury
acute respiratory distress syndrome
inflammation resolution
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Engineer liposomes built from ionizable cationic lipids to deliver docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid, into neutrophils and release it efficiently once inside.
- Measure in live mice how much resolvin, a pro-resolving lipid signal, neutrophils produce from DHA-liposome cargo, and optimize the formulation for that conversion.
- Test whether DHA-loaded liposomes reduce lung inflammation and improve survival in mouse models of acute lung injury.
- Define which properties of nanovesicles made from human neutrophil membranes are required for them to stick to inflamed blood-vessel lining.
- Load inhibitors of NF-kB, a master controller of inflammatory genes, into neutrophil nanovesicles and test them in endotoxin-induced mouse lung injury.
- Co-deliver an antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory drug in the same nanovesicle and test whether this both kills bacteria and resolves host inflammation in bacterium-induced lung injury.
More about the research
Attempts to simply blunt the immune response have disappointed in trials and left patients open to secondary infections. Work here takes a different angle: build nanoscale carriers that home to the inflamed blood vessels and immune cells of the lung, then either deliver drugs there or help the body switch itself from inflammation into active resolution. Mouse models of bacterial and endotoxin-induced lung injury are the main testbed.
Why it matters
Acute respiratory distress syndrome still kills a large share of the patients who develop it, with no drug approved to treat it. Nanocarriers that target inflamed lung vessels and neutrophils could allow much lower drug doses with fewer side effects, and a resolution-based approach could calm inflammation without leaving patients vulnerable to new infections. The same platforms may apply to other inflammatory and autoimmune conditions such as stroke, heart attack, atherosclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yamin Li
Upstate Medical University, NY·Pharmacology
Expand the chemical diversity of sulfonium lipids — carriers that use a charged sulfur group instead of the usual amine — by adding new head, linker and tail building blocks, and relate these structures to self-assembly, mRNA delivery and biocompatibility.
Jonathan Shannahan
Purdue University, IN·Pharmacology
Quantify how environmentally realistic nanoplastics made from plastic waste bind common environmental contaminants, and test whether this binding increases toxicity depending on plastic composition and size.
Ginger Milne
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Pharmacology
Identify how four specialized pro-resolving lipid mediators (RvE4, RvD1, RvD5 and maresin 2), molecules that help end inflammation, are chemically transformed using a laboratory model of human metabolism.
The school
University at Buffalo: 32 labs on PI Pages, $542M a year on research, 316 research doctorates a year.
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