Mentors

Lily Wu, M.D, Ph.D. (Primary)
Anna Wu, Ph.D. (Secondary)

Research Interests:

Engineering Targeted Therapeutics for Diagnosis and Treatment of Lymphatic Metastasis

Successful cancer therapy must ensure efficient delivery of cancer drugs to affected tissues, while causing little or no damage to normal tissues. I believe this is an area in medicine where the fusion of nanotechnology with molecular biology will generate great practical benefits. I am interested in the development of virus-based, targeted, cancer-specific detection agent that has the dual capability of detecting and treating breast lymph node metastases simultaneously. Additionally, I am interested to apply the same principles to engineer other classes of multifunctional nanoparticles, such as non-viral gene delivery vectors and polymer drug complexes for cancer therapy.

Assistant Researcher
Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
yufanghu@mednet.ucla.edu

Hu YF, Lee KYC, Israelachvili JN. "A Sealed Minitrough for Microscopy and Long-term Stability Studies of Langmuir Monolayers". Langmuir, 19 (1);100-104, 2003.

Hu YF, Dudevski I, Wood D, Moscarello M, Zasadzinski J, Israelachvili JN. "Synergistic Interactions of Lipids and Myelin Basic Protein", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101 (37);13466-13471, 2004.

Hu YF, Meleson K, Israelachvili JN. "Thermodynamic Equilibrium of Domains in Two-component Langmuir Monolayers". Biophysical Journal, 91;444-453, 2006.

Hu, YF, Wu, L., "A Dual-targeted Lentiviral Vector Homing in on Prostate Bone Metastases", Molecular Therapy, 5, 1906-1908, 2007.

Hu, YF, Anavitarte, A. P., Zandi, R., Knobler, C. M., Gelbart, W. M., "Packaging of a Polymer by Viral Nanocontainer", AIChE Proceedings, 2007.

Hu, YF, Israelachvili, J. N., "Effect of Myelin Basic Protein Binding on the Structure of Myelin Lipid Domains at the Air-water Interface", Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces, 62, 22-30, 2008.

Hu, YF, Zandi, R., Anavitarte, A. P., Knobler, C. M., Gelbart, W. M., "What Determines the Size of a Viral Capsid? Encapsidation of a Linear Polyelectrolyte by Viral Nanocontainer", Biophysical Journal, 94, 1428-1436, 2008.

Hu, YF, "Plant Virus Based Nanomaterials", Current Focus on Colloids and Surface Sciences, Research Signpost, 321-334, 2009.

Ming Y., Du, J., Gu, Z., Liang, M., Hu, YF, Zhang, W., Tang, Y., Segura, T., Liu, Z., Lu, Y., "Novel Intracellular Protein Delivery Platform Based on Single-Protein Nanocapsules", Nature Nanotechnology, 5, 48-53, 2010.

Hu, YF, Johnson, M., Pouliot, F., Wu, L., "Molecular Imaging of Metastasis", in press.