8/14/2025 Chloe Zant
Illinois bioengineering faculty member Hua Wang has advanced a promising cancer immunotherapy approach by improving a technology called metabolic glycan labeling. His team identified a key enzyme that hinders labeling in antigen-presenting cells (APCs) and found a way to inhibit it, enabling more effective delivery of immune-boosting agents directly to these cells. This breakthrough could enhance the body’s ability to generate cancer-fighting T cells, paving the way for more potent and targeted cancer treatments.
Written by Chloe Zant
Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) member Hua Wang perfectly encapsulates the CCIL’s multidisciplinary approach to fighting cancer: combining engineering, biology, and interdisciplinary collaboration to create innovative solutions for one of humanity’s greatest challenges. In his lab’s publication in Cell Chemical Biology, Wang fine tunes an important technology in biomaterial chemistry, which could potentially make way for more potent cancer immunotherapies in the future.
Wang’s work in this paper centers around antigen presenting cells (APCs), which are cells that can process and display antigens on their surface, helping to inform effector immune cells in the body of which pathogens need to be destroyed. “In the context of immunotherapy, we often want to deliver immunomodulatory agents, which are molecules that are able to stimulate or suppress immune responses, specifically to APCs,” said Wang. The roles of these agents range from helping your body fight more efficiently against foreign cells like cancer to preventing your immune system from damaging healthy tissues. “An effective strategy to deliver antigens and adjuvants to APCs has also been actively pursued for years, to develop robust vaccines for preventing and treating cancer, infections, and autoimmune disorders. However, such APC-targeting strategies are still not available,” added Wang.
This specificity requires a precise technology called metabolic glycan labeling, in which a normal sugar compound like glucose is modified with a special chemical functional group. “That chemical functional group, you can imagine, is like a handle for targeting applications,” says Wang. “It allows you to conjugate immunomodulatory agents to the cell, bringing in the drug of your choice.”
Bringing an immunomodulatory agent directly into an antigen presenting cell allows for the improved creation of antigen-specific T cells, which are cells that can directly fight off cancer and other infections in the immune system. However, before Wang’s recent research, metabolic glycan labeling was incredibly inefficient on antigen presenting cells. This meant that the “handle” on APCs is not enough for any agent to “grab on,” preventing it from real-world targeting applications in cancer immunotherapy.
Wang and his collaborators have been hard at work for years on glycan labeling technology, as previously reported by the CCIL, although this is the first time the lab has focused solely on its pathway of integration in APCs. During this process, they discovered an enzyme that gets overproduced by APCs in both humans and mice called RENBP, which converts the unnatural sugar molecule into an untraceable sugar derivative. “By inhibiting that enzyme,” explains Wang, “we can prevent the sugar compound from being converted to something else, so that it can be properly metabolized and label the antigen-presenting cells.”
“The goal has always been to develop better and safer therapies for cancer patients, especially for the types of cancer that are still very hard to treat,” said Wang on his latest development in his young and impressive research career. “Advancing cancer research is beyond faculty duty—it’s my life goal.”
Hua Wang is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Material Science & Engineering, Bioengineering, Materials Research Lab, and Biomedical and Translational Sciences. He also has affiliations with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, as well as the Carle R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research focuses primarily on cellular engineering, immunotherapy, and materials science and engineering.
The paper, “RENBP inhibition amplifies metabolic glycan labeling efficiency of antigen-presenting cells in vitro and in vivo,” is available here.
The T-cell schematic is originally credited to Hamid Teimouri at Rice University and can be accessed here.