Wenjun LAN, Ph.D

Tuveson's lab

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a deadly malignancy with no efficacious treatment. My PhD thesis is therefore dedicated to the development of safe and effective targeted therapy and personalized medicine for treating PDAC.To establish targeted therapy, I used a multidisciplinary approach to design, identify and evaluate a potent anticancer candidate ZZW-115 against NUPR1, a protein highly involved in tumor progress and drug resistance. Mechanistically, ZZW-115 is able to inhibit the translocation of NUPR1, induce cell death and sensitize cancer cells to genotoxic, producing an excellent anticancer effect with no adverse effects, hence constituting a promising drug candidate against PDAC. Parallelly, I have also developed a novel RNAs-based personalized nanomedicine to tailor therapy in PDAC by combining and harnessing the high specificity and broad targeting capability of small interfering RNA to target specific oncogenes and small activation RNA to target tumor suppression gene according to the tumor information of individual patient. Collectively, results of my PhD research project provide proof-of-concept studies on both targeting NUPR1 and RNAs-based personalized nanomedicine for effectively treating the deadly PDAC.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, scientists in France have been actively engaged in fighting COVID-19. Our team also rapidly initiated the project to screen and identify innovative dendrimers and nucleoside analogues as antiviral drug candidate in collaboration with the Laboratoire de Microbiologie Fondamentale et Pathogénicité (MFP CNRS UMR 5234) at Université de Bordeaux. To set up this project, I made a determinant role to prepare and classify more than 500 samples, and organized the transfer of all these samples to Bordeaux, which was a very difficult task at that time during the first period of lock down in France. Today, this project is very fruitful, and we have identified several promising candidates with potent antiviral activity against the SARS-CoV2, the virus which has caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

I went through three years of vigorous training and thus acquired exquisite skills in pharmaceutical biological research. At China Pharmaceutical University, I strengthened my theoretical knowledge of biological science, chemistry and pharmacy and got outstanding performance in the professional course test.

I was actively engaged in two nationally significant projects about cancer therapy and attended five international Bio-Medical symposiums to present several oral talks. All of these valuable experiences provide me with the ability to think logically and work accurately in the area of cancer therapy.

The general objective of my PhD thesis is to develop effective targeted and personalized therapies for pancreatic cancer. This is an interdisciplinary program between two labs: Dr. Juan IOVANNA’s group at CRCM and Dr. Ling PENG’s group at CINaM. Dr. Juan IOVANNA’s group has 20-year-long focused on NUPR1 and its anticancer effect on PDAC after its inhibition (genetically or pharmacologically), and Dr. Ling PENG’s group is working actively to establish modular, adaptive and functional dendrimer systems as nanopharmaceutics for biomedical applications.

My master project was focus on breast cancer tumor microenvironment study by using Adeno-associated virus (AAV) based iRFP682 labeled exosomes.