Nanomedicine and Cancer Immunotherapy

Prof. Hai-jun YU (Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201203, China)

Prof. Hai-jun Yu joined Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM) since 2012 as a Pharmacist and was promoted to be a principal investigator since 2018. He is dedicated to developing smart drug delivery system for improving cancer therapy, in particular prodrug-based nanomedicine for cancer immunotherapy. He has developed a set of stimuli-activatable nanosized drug delivery systems with improved drug delivery efficacy and therapeutic performance by overcoming the pathophysiological barriers of the solid tumors and cooperatively modulating the tumor immune microenvironment. He was the recipient of the Excellent Young Scholar of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and the winner of the Youth Biopharmaceutical Award of Chinese Pharmaceutical Association.

Prof. Bruno De Geest (Ghent University, Ghent, 9000, Belgium)

Prof. Bruno De Geest is a chemical engineer and obtained an independent professor position in 2012 at the Department of Pharmaceutics at Ghent University and was appointed as Full Professor in 2019. He is currently a recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant awarded by the European Commission. The lab of Prof. De Geest operates at the interface between materials chemistry and immunology. He has a strong interest in engineering the immune system via functional materials that can either modulate the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profile of immuno-modulatory stimuli and antigens. This is combined with developing strategies that modulate the interaction between immune cells and cancer cells.