1/7/2025
Hua Wang uses materials engineering to create cancer vaccines
In developing robust cancer vaccines and immunotherapy, biomaterials that can facilitate “reprogramming” of the immune system could be a game-changer. That is where materials science & engineering professor Hua Wang comes in. He develops material complexes that, when injected, trap immune cells and reprogram them to target cancerous cells.
He is leading a $946,000 grant from the American Cancer Society to develop mRNA therapeutics based on biomaterial scaffolds; awards from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense are supporting other projects he’s pursuing in this area.
Traditional vaccines are injected into the body, and their components then migrate to find the right immune cells to target. The process is extremely inefficient, with less than 0.1% of the vaccine component finding the right cells.
Wang’s research group is improving the efficiency by designing material systems that attract and hold immune cells. With specially designed biomaterials, one 100-micrometer hydrogel system can attract and reprogram millions of immune cells.
“We like to call our material systems ‘training camps’ for immune cells in the body,” Wang said. “Once an immune cell is ‘recruited,’ it’s reprogrammed entirely within the material. After that, the immune cell will be ready to train tumor-specific ‘T cells’ that can migrate throughout the whole body to fight the cancer.”
Wang is developing treatments for cancer, but he hopes that the solutions will also be applicable to type 1 diabetes and other autoimmune diseases.
“The methods we develop could extend to any condition in which the body’s immune system does not adequately respond to a disease,” he said. “And we’ll have a leg up because our first-principles engineering approach shows us how to proceed in the future.”
Wang’s collaborators include a neurosurgeon at Carle Health with clinical expertise in cancer therapy.
Hua Wang is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering. He also holds appointments in the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering and the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. He is a member of the Cancer Center at Illinois and a part-time member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois. He is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory at Illinois Grainger Engineering and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. He holds a Grainger Endowed Chair in Engineering.