Cancelled [Seminar] "Charm of calixarenes in biomedical applications", Prof. Dong-Sheng Guo

Abstract: On demand of precision medicine, developing novel biomedical materials is highly appealing. Until now, a lot of nanomaterials, including lipids, polymers, carbon, silica oxides, metal oxides and semiconductor nanocrystals, have been used to formulate nanomedicine that can facilitate better understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of pathological diseases. Supramolecular chemistry has broad potential application for biology and medicine in virtue of molecular recognition and self-assembly. As a result, exploring supramolecular biomedical materials would open an avenue towards precision medicine.

Calixarene, composed of phenolic units linked by methylene groups at the 2- and 6-positions, represents the third generation of supramolecular hosts after crown ether and cyclodextrin. As one family of classical artificial macrocyclic receptors, calixarene shows advantages of facile modification, pre-organized framework and unique binding property. In our group, we take advantage of molecular recognition and self-assembly of calixarenes to engineer new smart biomaterials to achieve precision medicine, including inhibition of amyloid fibrillation, supramolecular phototheranostics, fluorescence sensing for biomolecules, and biomembrane transport. In this presentation, I will report our recent progress on supramolecular biomedical materials based on calixarenes. To be envisaged, calixarene is emerging as one kind of new supramolecular materials for precision medicine with a specialized host-guest recognition site.

[1]  Xu, Z.; Jia, S.-R.; Wang, W; Yuan, Z.; Ravoo, B. J; Guo, D.-S. Nat. Chem. 2019, 11, 86–93.
[2]  Gao, J.; Li, J.; Geng, W.-C.; Chen, F.-Y.; Duan, X.; Zheng, Z.; Ding, D.; Guo, D.-S. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2018, 140, 4945–4953.
[3]  Geng, W.-C.; Jia, S.; Zheng, Z.; Li, Z.; Ding, D.; Guo, D.-S. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2019, 58, 2377–2381.
[4]  Peng, S.; Barba-Bon, A.; Pan, Y.-C.; Nau, W. M.; Guo, D.-S.; Hennig, A. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2017, 56, 15742–15745.
[5]  Xu, Z.; Peng, S.; Wang, Y.-Y.; Zhang, J.-K.; Lazar, A. I.; Guo, D.-S. Adv. Mater. 2016, 28, 7666–7671.

Biography: Dong-Sheng Guo obtained his Ph.D degree at Nankai University (Supervisor: Prof. Yu Liu) in 2006. Then he joined Prof. Yu Liu’s group as a faculty member at College of Chemistry, Nankai University. He was promoted as an associate professor in 2008, and a full professor in 2013. During Sep.-Nov. 2014, he has been a DAAD fellowship at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Since 2014, he began to work independently as a principle investigator at Nankai University. The current research interest in his group is supramolecular biomedical materials.