Fei Zhu

National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences | NCNST · Department of Biology

Somatic cell reprogramming toward induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) holds great promise in future regenerative medicine. However, the reprogramming process mediated by the traditional defined factors (OSMK) is slow and extremely inefficient. Here, we develop a combination of modified reprogramming factors (OySyNyK) in which the transactivation...

Trained immunity refers to the innate immune system building memory‐like features in response to subsequent infections and vaccinations. Compared with classical tumor vaccines, trained immunity‐related vaccines (TIrV) are independent of tumor‐specific antigens. Bacterial outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) contain an abundance of PAMPs and have the pote...

Stem cell-based regenerative therapies, which harness the self-renewal and differentiation property of stem cells, have been in the spotlight due to their widespread applications in treating degenerative, aging and other, generally intractable diseases. Therapeutically effective hematopoietic stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, embryonic stem cells...

Nanoparticles (NP) spanning diverse materials and properties have the potential to encapsulate and to protect a wide range of therapeutic cargos to increase bioavailability, to prevent undesired degradation, and to mitigate toxicity. Fulvestrant, a selective estrogen receptor degrader, is commonly used for treating patients with estrogen receptor (...

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have wide applications in disease modeling, personalized medicine, and tissue engineering. The generation of iPSCs from somatic cells via transcriptional‐factor‐ or chemical molecule‐based approaches are time‐consuming and inefficient. Here, a cell‐reprogramming‐inspired dynamically responsive hydrogel is fabr...

Micro-nano biorobots based on bacteria have demonstrated great potential for tumor diagnosis and treatment. The bacterial gene expression and drug release should be spatiotemporally controlled to avoid drug release in healthy tissues and undesired toxicity. Herein, we describe an alternating magnetic field-manipulated tumor-homing bacteria develope...

The widespread preexisting immunity against virus‐like particles (VLPs) seriously limits the applications of VLPs as vaccine vectors. Enabling technology for exogenous antigen display should not only ensure the assembly ability of VLPs and site‐specific modification, but also consider the effect of preexisting immunity on the behavior of VLPs in vi...

In tumor nanovaccines, nanocarriers enhance the delivery of tumor antigens to antigen-presenting cells (APCs), thereby ensuring the robust activation of tumor antigen-specific effector T-cells to kill tumor cells. Through employment of their high immunogenicity and nanosize, we have developed a "Plug-and-Display" delivery platform on the basis of b...

Restoring sodium iodide symporter (NIS) expression and function remains a major challenge for radioiodine therapy in anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC). For more efficient delivery of messenger RNA (mRNA) to manipulate protein expression, a lipid‐peptide‐mRNA (LPm) nanoparticle (NP) is developed. The LPm NP is prepared by using amphiphilic peptides to...

Nanocarriers with intrinsic immune adjuvant properties can activate the innate immune system while delivering tumor antigen, thus efficiently facilitating antitumor adaptive immunity. Bacteria-derived outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) are an excellent candidate due to their abundance of pathogen associated molecular patterns. However, during the uptak...

The POU domain transcription factor Oct4 plays critical roles in self-renewal and pluripotency of embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Together with Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc, Oct4 can reprogram any other cell types to pluripotency, in which Oct4 is the only factor that cannot be functionally replaced by other POU family members. To investigate the determinant...