New Faculty Member at ISU Joins the Nanovaccine Institute Consortium

August 23, 2022 – Ames, Iowa – The Nanovaccine Institute is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Jing Wang to the Nanovaccine Institute consortium. Wang is the third researcher to join the Institute in August.

Dr. Jing Wang will join Iowa State University as an Assistant Professor in Chemical Biological Engineering. Wang’s research focus includes nanotechnology and drug delivery, protein engineering and peptide drug, immunotherapy and immune-directed imaging, and treatment of cancer metastasis and lung diseases.

Wang was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

“Dr. Wang’s addition to the Nanovaccine Institute will assist in expanding our focus on nanotechnologies and cancer immunotherapy,” says Dr. Balaji Narasimhan, Director of the Nanovaccine Institute. “Dr. Wang’s particular focus on monitoring metastatic tumor dormancy has the potential for significantly improving outcomes for cancer patients.”

Dr. Wang’s lab (Jing’s Lab @ ISU) is located on the 4th floor of Biorenewables Research Laboratory (BRL). Jing’s lab aims to leverage advanced technologies such as nanotechnology, active targeting strategy, and protein engineering to design and develop immunotherapeutic drugs to help cancer patients to achieve tumor dormancy (the arrest of tumor growth in the primary and metastatic sites) and long-term survival after primary therapy.

“We cannot expect the complete clearance of cancer cells from the cancer patients, but we can try our best to help the patients to drive these cancer cells to sleep and stop growing (dormancy) through immune activation and stay away from tumor recurrence and metastasis,” says Dr. Jing Wang. “Unfortunately, there are few dormancy-driven immunotherapeutic drugs available for cancer patients. And we, as biomedical engineering researchers, have the responsivities to fill the gap.”

The Nanovaccine Institute is a consortium of 81 researchers at 24 universities, research institutes, national laboratories, and companies, founded and coordinated at Iowa State University. Our research is a transdisciplinary merger of expertise in immunology, nanotechnology, materials science, microbiology, neuroscience, cancer biology, gerontology, clinical science, and social science. Our vision is that nanovaccines and nanotherapeutics will revolutionize how we prevent and treat disease.

Information Contact:

Hanna Bates, Research Administrator, Nanovaccine Institute. Email: hbates@iastate.edu. Phone: 515-294-2194