Research

Areas of Research:

- Large-scale cell biomanufacturing: The goals are to i) systematically understand how the cell culture microenvironment factors, individually and combined, influence the cell culture outcome (e.g., cell viability, growth rate, and yield) and product properties (e.g., genetics, epigenetics, metabolomics, transcriptome, secretome, and in vivo homing, survival, integration, safety and potency); and ii) apply the gained knowledge to develop transformative cell culture technologies that enable robust manufacturing of high quality and high quantity therapeutic cells at various scales and affordable cost.

- Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) therapy: We study MSCs as anti-aging, anti-inflammation, and immuno-suppressing therapeutics.

- T cells for cancer immunotherapies: The goal is to develop technology to culture T cells, CAR-T cells, tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), NK, CAR-NK cells so they have long persistence and potency for treating cancers to reduce the recurrence.

- Brown adipose tissue (BAT) for treating type 2 diabetes: The goal is to develop transplantable induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived BATs for treating type 2 diabetes.

- Combinational biotherapeutics for chronic wounds: The goal is to develop a high-potency biotherapeutics for chronic wounds. Fibrin is the provisional matrix and drug-releasing vehicle.

- Cell culture meat: With industrial collaborators, we address a few bottlenecks of the emerging cultivated meat industry, including fabricating large-volume tissue, scaling up cell culture, and developing cell banks