Prof. Liming Bian
Department of Biomedical Engineering

Professor Liming Bian from the Department of Biomedical Engineering and his research team have recently developed a novel method for preparing single chain nanomaterial with significantly improved efficiency over that of previous methods. Prof. BIAN's team further investigated the impact of the dynamic molecular structural change of such material, and the cellular interactions in different biomedical applications at varying scales. This study has been recently published in the prestigious scientific journal《Nature communications》.

The ability to precisely control the structure and the function of synthetic materials has profound significance because molecule level designs are critical to regulating the properties and functions of biomaterials at various scales. In conventional methods, single chain polymeric nanoparticles or nanogels are generally produced under highly dilute conditions or with low monomer conversion rates, which severely hinder the wide-spread application of single chain nano-objects. Here, Professor BIAN and his team first developed a new way of preparing single chain materials with significantly improved efficiency (600 folds) than that of previous methods, and further show the wide applications of such materials in biomedical engineering, such as in gene or drug delivery and regulation of the behaviour stem cells at nanoscale. At the same time, such an advanced nano-material can realise the effective protection of stem cells and regulation of cell behaviour, which is of great significance in stem cell therapy, stem cell tissue engineering application and research.

He has been committed to the development of advanced nanomaterials and hydrogel materials in the field of biomedical applications since joining CUHK in 2013. Due to this new and insightful research work, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers supervised by Professor Bian have received many prestigious awards. The project has been supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the Health and Medical Research Fund, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Innovation Technology Fund and the Chow Yuk Ho Technology Centre for Innovative Medicine.