When Liangfang Zhang got the news, it was a typical morning. He had just finished dropping his daughter off at school and was on his way to his lab.
But then something unusual happened. He received a phone call at seven in the morning — an hour he would not normally receive messages.
Like any good scientist he was skeptical.
“I just don't feel like it's real,” said Zhang, who is a chemical and bioengineer at UC San Diego. “The folks from the foundation ask me to verify my name and ask me if I could find a private place to talk. It felt quite suspicious.”
Zhang was awarded with a MacArthur fellowship, a prestigious grant given to inspiring creatives across the country. He was recognized for pioneering a new category of medicine called nanomedicine. The technology may lead to innovative therapies for difficult diseases like cancer, sepsis, and more.
Zhang was one of 20 individuals selected for the fellowship across an unlimited variety of disciplines. This year’s cohort includes professions such as an economic historian, poet, and forensic anthropologist.
The award is also known as the ‘genius grant’. The MacArthur Foundation gifts recipients with $800,000 to support their creative process. Unlike other types of grants, there are no strings attached to the funding. That means Zhang does not have to use the money for specific purposes.
“I see this as a great encouragement to my research team and myself to continue to do the creative and impactful research along the line we are working on,” he said.
Recipients are recognized for their potential to innovate work that changes society for the better. He was chosen for pioneering a new type of medicine.
It uses particles, called nanoparticles, that are one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair to deliver drugs to the body. These nanomedicines can also help remove toxins, block infections, and treat diseases.
“Nanomedicine can not only make the current existing medicine more effective, less toxic, but it can also create new therapies that didn’t exist before,” Zhang said.
Traditional drugs often must target specific receptors, or sites, on a molecule to work. But nanomedicines are more versatile. Instead of creating new molecules, they use components of human cells that already exist. That means they can find infected areas more easily.
“If you have some internal infection, infection in certain organs and tissues, then we use the cells that can recognize these infected sites and then we send the drug there,” he said.
To sneak the nanoparticles past the human immune system, Zhang coasted them in cell membranes that our bodies already recognized. A cell membrane is a biological barrier that separates the inside of the cell from its outside environment.
“It’s sorta like we disguise the nanoparticles with human cells. The reason we do that is we want to protect the nanoparticles after we get into the human body,” Zhang said. “Because our body is very good at recognizing these foreign materials.”
The incognito nanoparticles can be used in many ways once inside the body. Zhang believes that using the body’s own biological materials as medicine may one day be able to help reduce antibiotic resistant infections.
He hopes to use the genius grant to continue advancing the technology and pushing his research closer to clinical trials.
