1/7/2025
Shuming Nie uses nanoparticles for treatment solutions
Many cancer treatment techniques require nanoscale knowledge of the cells. This dictates what drugs, chemicals and other living matter can interact with them. It also makes cancer treatment a prime application area for nanotechnology.
Bioengineering professor and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering Shuming Nie specializes in developing nanotechnology for oncological applications. He has developed nanoparticles to mark tumors for image-guided robotic surgery, and he is applying his knowledge of nanoscale biomaterials to the development of cancer vaccines.
“My specialty, nanomedicine, really is at the interface between engineering and medicine,” Nie said. “We use advancements in engineering to develop new technologies that provide entirely new clinical practices. Without an engineering perspective, you would not combine molecular imaging with robotics to develop image-guided surgery, and you would not use materials science principles to design vaccine components.”
Oncological surgeons are guided by visual cues when resecting tumors, but tumor heterogeneity – wherein cells differ across a tumor – can make visual indicators unreliable. Nie leads research into nanoparticle tags for labeling cancerous cells. They can be engineered to bind to the specific cellular receptors in a tumor and emit light to guide the surgeon.
“It’s highly unlikely that 100% of the tumor can be targeted solely on a visual basis,” Nie explained. “Realistically, you could target 98% to 99%. For a tumor with 1 billion cells, that leaves behind 10 million, leaving a significant chance for relapse. With visual markers, the cancerous cells glow, so you know that you’re not leaving anything behind.”
Nie is collaborating with clinical partners in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the Emory University School of Medicine, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
Nie is also leveraging his expertise in nanomedicine for the development of oncological immunotherapy, training the body’s immune system to fight cancerous cells on its own. In recent decades, clinicians have successfully used this approach to treat blood cancers by removing immune cells from the patient’s blood, genetically modifying them to target cancer, and reinjecting them into the patient.
Solid tumors present a more challenging problem because they are not in direct contact with the bloodstream and exhibit heterogeneity. Nie is among the researchers taking lessons from messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines to develop treatments tailored for individual patients.
“When we talk about COVID vaccines, it’s usually about the abilities of mRNA. It’s a wonderful technology, but it depends on lipid nanoparticles for delivery,” he said. “Nanoscale engineering... made it work. I think there are lessons from COVID that will translate to cancer, but it’s a fundamentally different problem. It’s a problem that we need engineers to solve.”
Nie believes that engineers are uniquely positioned to solve such problems because they are trained to translate scientific ideas into working solutions.
He explained, “Cancer research is traditionally divided into two focuses: the fundamental biology of cancer, and clinical diagnostics and treatment. Engineering is the bridge between them. We take the science and make it into a working solution for the patient.”
Shuming Nie is a professor of bioengineering in the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering. He also holds appointments in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at Illinois. He is a member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois, and he is affiliated with the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at Illinois Grainger Engineering and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. He holds a Grainger Endowed Chair in Engineering.