Lecture Title: Norepinephrine Receptor Agonists: A New Generation of Anti-Tumor Immunotherapeutics
Date and Time: October 17, 2023 (Tuesday), 2:45-4:15 PM
Location: Room 404 Zhenzhen Building Smart Classroom, Medical School
Speaker: Dr. Zhu Jingjing
Speaker Biography:
Dr. Zhu Jingjing is a researcher at the R&D center of Helsinn Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. She earned her Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and conducted postdoctoral research at the de Duve Institute/Ludwig Cancer Research branch in Belgium. Since 2017, she has served as a senior researcher at the de Duve Institute. The institute, founded by Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, was the first laboratory to discover and isolate tumor antigens.
As a team leader at the de Duve Institute in Belgium, Dr. Zhu Jingjing has dedicated her work to studying the mechanisms of tumor immune evasion and has led her team in the development and optimization of anti-tumor immunotherapy targets and methods. She has been in charge of national-level scientific research projects with a total funding of over 50 million RMB and has extensive experience in anti-tumor drug development.
Dr. Zhu Jingjing has published 23 papers in significant international journals, with more than 10 high-impact papers as the first author or corresponding author in top-tier journals such as Nature, Nature Communications, Cancer Immunology Research, and The Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer; she holds three international patents. She also serves as an editor for several renowned international journals (e.g., Frontier in Immunology).
Main Representative Achievements:
① Development of new tumor immunotherapy targets. She was the first to propose the α2-adrenergic receptor as a novel tumor immunotherapy target. This finding could potentially address the issue of most tumor patients not responding to PD-1 antibodies, and the paper on this discovery was published in Nature.
② Establishment of new administration methods for anti-tumor immunotherapy checkpoint inhibitors. She suggested that the low tumor infiltration rate of traditional PD-1/PD-L1 antibodies is a significant cause of tumor immune tolerance. Her team developed a method using anti-tumor CD8 T cells as carriers to deliver anti-PD-L1 nanoantibodies directly to the tumor site. This approach significantly enhances the anti-tumor effect of PD-L1 antibodies and reduces their side effects.
③ Discovery of new mechanisms of cancer immune resistance. She proposed a cancer immune resistance mechanism mediated by apoptosis of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and demonstrated that blocking the Fas-Fas ligand interaction with neutralizing antibodies could improve the survival and anti-tumor activity of tumor-specific lymphocytes.
