Dong Chen

Zhejiang University | ZJU · Department of Energy Engineering

The effective removal of complex pollutants is extremely challenging for environmental and material science, especially pollutants including detergents and pesticides do not decompose or degrade in the aquatic environment which cannot be easily removed. Here, a novel biocompatible superparamagnetic nanocomposite integrating the advantages of porous...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a common malignancy involving multiple cellular components. The CRC tumor microenvironment (TME) has been characterized well at single-cell resolution. However, a spatial interaction map of the CRC TME is still elusive. Here, we integrate multiomics analyses and establish a spatial interaction map to improve the prognosis...

High‐performance bio‐based fibers have unique advantages in biocompatibility for biomedical applications, such as sutures, hernia patches, and blood vessels. Herein, strong and tough biofibers based on regenerated silk fibroins (RSFs) are designed by a dual‐crosslinking strategy and prepared continuously in situ via a single‐channel microfluidic de...

The manipulation of internal interactions at the molecular level within biological fibers is of particular importance but challenging, severely limiting their tunability in macroscopic performances and applications. It thus becomes imperative to explore new approaches to enhance biological fibers’ stability and environmental tolerance and to impart...

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) is one of the most aggressive types of human cancers. Although paclitaxel (PTX) was proven to exert potent anti-tumor effects against ICC, the delivery of PTX is still challenging due to its hydrophobic property. Nanoparticle (NP)-based carriers have been proven to be effective drug delivery vehicles. Among the...

The combination of ferroptosis inducers and immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) can enhance antitumor effects. However, the efficacy in tumors with low immunogenicity requires further investigation. Herein, we have developed a water-in-oil Pickering emulsion gel to deliver (1S, 3R)-RSL-3 (RSL-3), a ferroptosis inducer dissolved in iodized oil and prog...

High‐strength and high‐toughness bio‐based fibers attract broad interest in biomechanical applications. Herein, strong and tough organic–inorganic regenerated silk fibroin/hydroxyapatite (RSF/HAP) hybrid fibers are prepared using a single‐channel microfluidic device. Calcium phosphate oligomers (CPOs) dispersed in the RSF matrix first grow into sph...

Rationale Hypoxia in tumor microenvironment (TME) represents an obstacle to the efficacy of immunotherapy for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) through several aspects such as increasing the expression of immune checkpoints or promoting fibrosis. Reversing hypoxic TME is a potential strategy to improve the validity of immune checkpoint blocka...

Elastomers generally possess low Young's modulus and high failure strain, which are widely used in soft robots and intelligent actuators. However, elastomers generally lack diverse functionalities, such as stimulated shape morphing, and a general strategy to implement these functionalities into elastomers is still challenging. Here, a microfluidic...

Increasing drug loading remains a critical challenge in the development and translation of nanomedicine. High drug‐loading nanoparticles have demonstrated unique advantages such as less carrier material used, better‐controlled drug release, and improved efficacy and safety. Herein, we report a simple and efficient salt concentration screening metho...

Electro-optic response of liquid crystals (LCs) relies on the molecular reorientation of LCs under external electric field and is important for a wide spectrum of applications. Here, we uncover an interesting electro-optic response of 5CB nematic LC confined in an oblate spheroid and subjected to external electric field. Under the planar anchoring,...

Strong and tough bio‐based fibers are attractive for both fundamental research and practical applications. In this work, strong and tough hierarchical core–shell fibers with cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) in the core and regenerated silk fibroins (RSFs) in the shell are designed and prepared, mimicking natural spider silks. CNF/RSF core–shell fibers...

Microcapsules are versatile delivery vehicles and widely used in various areas. Generally, microcapsules with solid shells lack selective permeation and only exhibit a simple release mode. Here, we use ultrathin-shell water-in-oil-in-water double emulsions as templates and design porous ultrathin-shell microcapsules for selective permeation and mul...

The conversion and utilization of carbon dioxide (CO2) have dual significance for reducing carbon emissions and solving energy demand. Catalytic reduction of CO2 is a promising way to convert and utilize CO2. However, high-performance catalysts with excellent catalytic activity, selectivity and stability are currently lacking. High-throughput metho...

DNA has attracted increasing interest as an appealing medium for information storage. However, target-specific rewriting of the digital data stored in intracellular DNA remains a grand challenge because the highly repetitive nature and uneven guanine-cytosine content render the encoded DNA sequences poorly compatible with endogenous ones. In this s...

Hypoxia is a typical characteristic of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which causes tremendous obstacles to tumor treatments. Current first-line treatment may further deteriorate tumor hypoxia. For example, Lenvatinib, a receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor (RTKI), suppresses tumor growth via blocking vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) signali...

Programmable base pair interactions at the nanoscale make DNA an attractive scaffold for forming hydroxyapatite (HAP) nanostructures. However, engineering macroscale HAP mineralization guided by DNA molecules remains challenging. To overcome this issue, we developed a facile strategy for the fabrication of ultra‐stiff DNA–HAP bulk composites. The e...

Hypoxia is a typical characteristic of most solid malignancies, which has multiple effects on malignant phenotypes and biological behaviors of tumors including epithelial-mesenchymal-transition (EMT), invasion, migration, metastasis, autophagy, stem cell maintenance, pathological angiogenesis, drug resistance, and immunosuppression. Rcentlyumoand r...

Many natural fibers are lightweight and display remarkable strength and toughness. These properties originate from the fibers’ hierarchical structures, assembled from the molecular to macroscopic scale. The natural spinning systems that produce such fibers are highly energy efficient, inspiring researchers to mimic these processes to realize robust...

Cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) particles can adaptively respond to constant changes in external stimuli and thus are widely used in solvent-sensing, pattern fabrication, and anti-counterfeiting. Previous studies discussed the color change at the center of the particles for various applications. However, few studies analyzed the color change of th...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), due to the lack of efficient diagnostic methods and short of available treatments, becomes the third main cause of cancer deaths. Novel treatments for HCCs are thus in great need. The fast-growing area of drug delivery provides intriguing possibility to design nanocarriers with unique properties. The nanocarriers per...

Spherical Viscoelastic Bio‐Ink Particles In article number 2109004, Li‐Heng Cai and co‐workers develop a 3D bioprinting technique for the digital assembly of viscoelastic spherical bio‐ink particles (DASP). Unlike most existing bioprinting techniques that use 1D filaments as building blocks, the DASP uses spherical particles, which are effectively...

Simulating the structures and behaviors of living organisms are of great significance to develop novel multi-functional intelligent devices. However, the development of biomimetic devices with complex deformable structures and synergistic properties is still on the way. Herein, we propose a simple and effective approach to create the multi-function...

Information storage based on DNA molecules provides a promising solution with advantages of low‐energy consumption, high storage efficiency, and long lifespan. However, there are only four natural nucleotides and DNA storage is thus limited by 2 bits per nucleotide. Here, artificial nucleotides into DNA data storage to achieve higher coding efficie...

Nanoprecipitation is a flexible method to prepare biocompatible nanoparticles (NPs) for drug delivery and so on. However, it is generally hard to co-precipitate multiple polymers due to their different solvent solubility. Here, shellac/PLA/PS trimer NPs are prepared for the first time via one-step co-precipitation upon rapid solvent exchange and co...

The development of new storage media to meet the demands for diverse information storage scenarios is a great challenge. Here, a series of lanthanide-based luminescent organogels with ultrastrong mechanical performance and outstanding plasticity are developed for patterned information storage and encryption applications. The organogels possessing o...

Polypeptides consisting of amino acid (AA) sequences are suitable for high-density information storage. However, the lack of suitable encoding systems, which accommodate the characteristics of polypeptide synthesis, storage and sequencing, impedes the application of polypeptides for large-scale digital data storage. To address this, two reliable an...

DNA-based gels are attractive materials as they allow intuitive rational design, respond to external physicochemical stimuli, and show great potential for biomedical applications. However, their relatively poor mechanical properties currently limit their technological application considerably as the latter requires mechanical integrity and tunabili...

Amphiphilic molecules adsorbed at the interface could control the orientation of liquid crystals (LCs) while LCs in turn could influence the distributions of amphiphilic molecules. The studies on the interactions between liquid crystals and amphiphilic molecules at the interface are important for the development of molecular sensors. In this paper,...

3D bioprinting additively assembles bio‐inks to manufacture tissue‐mimicking biological constructs, but with the typical building blocks limited to 1D filaments. Here, it is developed a voxelated bioprinting technique for the digital assembly of spherical particles (DASP), which are effectively 0D voxels—the basic unit of 3D structures. It is shown...

Solar vapor generation is emerging as one of the most important sustainable techniques for harvesting clean water using abundant and green solar energy. The rational design of solar evaporators to realize high solar evaporation performances has become a great challenge. Here, a porous solar evaporator with integrative optimization of photothermal c...

Hierarchical emulsions are interesting for both scientific researches and practical applications. Hierarchical emulsions prepared by microfluidics require complicated device geometry and delicate control of flow rates. Here, a versatile method is developed to design hierarchical emulsions using microfluidic 3D droplet printing in droplet. The proce...

Manipulating fluids at varying length scales and understanding their underlying mechanisms are significant for interdisciplinary studies of physics, chemistry, biology and engineering; fluid manipulation plays an important role in both scientific research and industrial applications. Here, we systematically review milli-, micro- and nanofluidics wi...

Properties of emulsions highly depend on the interdroplet interactions and, thus, engineering interdroplet interactions at molecular scale are essential to achieve desired emulsion systems. Here, attractive Pickering emulsion gels (APEGs) are designed and prepared by bridging neighboring particle‐stabilized droplets via telechelic polymers. In the...

Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting additively assembles bio-inks to manufacture tissue-mimicking biological constructs, but with the typical building blocks limited to one-dimensional filaments. Here, we develop a technique for the digital assembly of spherical particles (DASP), which are effectively zero-dimensional voxels – the basic unit of 3D s...

The development of biomedical glues is an important, yet challenging task as seemingly mutually exclusive properties need to be combined in one material, i.e. strong adhesion and adaption to remodeling processes in healing tissue. Here, we report a biocompatible and biodegradable protein-based adhesive with high adhesion strengths. The maximum stre...

Inorganic nanoparticles are widely investigated due to their unique and fascinating physical and chemical properties. However, due to the strong interparticle interactions, they generally form irreversible random aggregates with elevated temperatures. This limits their technological applications considerably as the latter requires structural orderi...

Pickering emulsions are emulsions stabilized by colloidal surfactants, i.e. solid particles. Compared with traditional molecular surfactant-stabilized emulsions, Pickering emulsions show many advantages, such as high resistance to coalescence, long-term stability, good biocompatibility and tunable properties. In recent years, Pickering emulsions ar...

Ein Quenching‐Dequenching‐Prozess von fluoreszenzmarkierten Nanopartikeln in biologischer Umgebung wird von Chun‐Xia Zhao und Mitarbeitern in ihrem Forschungsartikel vorgestellt (DOI: 10.1002/ange.202101730). Mit Farbstoffmolekülen im festen Zustand führte die Freisetzung und/oder der Abbau der farbstoffmarkierten Nanopartikel in biologischer Umgeb...

A quenching‐to‐dequenching switch of fluorescence‐labeled nanoparticles in biological environments was unveiled by Chun‐Xia Zhao and co‐workers in their Research Article (DOI: 10.1002/anie.202101730). With dye molecules at a solid state, the release and/or degradation of the dye‐labeled nanoparticles in biological environments led to a several‐fold...

A general strategy to carry out cell uptake and biodistribution studies is to label nanoparticles (NPs) with a fluorescent dye. However, the comparative study of different dye‐loaded NPs remains difficult owing to uncontrolled dye quenching and de‐quenching. Here we compared two types of dye‐labeled NPs and demonstrated their distinct properties. N...

A ubiquitous quenching‐to‐dequenching switch of dye‐labeled nanoparticles in vitro and in vivo is presented. When dye‐labeled nanoparticles interact with biological systems (cell culture medium, cells, and organs to animals), the dye undergoes the switch, causing a significant increase of fluorescence intensity. Abstract A general strategy to carr...

Hypoxia represents a tremendous barrier for effective radiotherapy in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Treatment strategies for improving hypoxia are of great significance to enhance radiotherapy efficacy. Here, we designed polydopamine-nanoparticle-stabilized oxygen microcapsules by interfacial polymerization, which encapsulated oxygen in the core...

Complex coacervation enables important wet adhesion processes in natural and artificial systems. However, existed synthetic coacervate adhesives show limited wet adhesion properties, non‐thermoresponsiveness, and inferior biodegradability, greatly hampering their translations. Herein, by harnessing supramolecular assembly and rational protein desig...

A thermal-responsive protein-based robust bioadhesive was assembled through complex coacervation. The aggregation trend of valine-rich domains and the change in the backbone conformational states reversibly triggered the phase transition and the enhanced wet adhesion bonding. Abstract Complex coacervation enables important wet adhesion processes i...

Polymer nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted significant interest in the past years for drug delivery and triggered release. However, it remains a significant challenge to produce polymer NPs with controlled properties and tunable drug loading. Traditional nanoprecipitation often leads to low drug loading. This study reports the development of a new...

Living organisms in nature have amazing control over their color, shape, and morphology in response to environmental stimuli for camouflage, communication, or reproduction. Inspired by the camouflage of the octopus via the elongation or contraction of its pigment cells, oblate cholesteric liquid crystal droplets are dispersed in a polymer matrix, s...

Polydopamine‐nanoparticle‐stabilized oxygen microcapsules are developed. These are capable of alleviating the hypoxia condition of a tumor microenvironment. Synergetic treatment using oxygen microcapsules and gemcitabine drugs is shown to be an effective strategy for enhanced tumor therapy. Abstract Most tumors have more severe hypoxia levels than...

Most tumors have more severe hypoxia levels than normal tissue; tumor hypoxia is thus a useful target for cancer treatment. Here, we develop an effective oxygen delivery vehicle of polydopamine‐nanoparticle‐stabilized oxygen microcapsules by interfacial polymerization. The oxygen microcapsules have excellent biocompatibility. Oxygen could easily di...

Ionic liquids (ILs) have many attractive properties. For example, their physical and chemical properties can be tuned by a judicious design of the cations and anions, making them ideal candidates for designable building blocks of stimuli‐responsive materials. Numerous IL‐based stimuli‐responsive materials have been developed by chemical modificatio...

By combining synthetic biology and protein engineering, anisotropic protein organofibers with extraordinary mechanical properties for cellular mechanobiology applications are assembled. This approach can be used to fabricate novel protein‐based fiber devices that are suitable for various translations such as mechano‐patch engraftments as well as or...

Nanoparticles with diverse structures and unique properties have attracted increasing attention for their widespread applications. Co‐precipitation under rapid mixing is an effective method to obtained biocompatible nanoparticles and diverse particle carriers are achieved by controlled phase separation via interfacial tensions. In this Minireview,...

Understanding drug‐release kinetics is critical for the development of drug‐loaded nanoparticles. We developed a J‐aggregate‐based Förster‐resonance energy‐transfer (FRET) method to investigate the release of novel high‐drug‐loading (50 wt %) nanoparticles in comparison with low‐drug‐loading (0.5 wt %) nanoparticles. Single‐dye‐loaded nanoparticles...

DNA as a storage medium has enormous potential because of its high storage density, but the produced redundancy limits this potential. The introduction of less error corrections to fully increase the storage density in DNA remains a major challenge. To address this, an optimized Base64 method is developed and accordingly we realized a high specific...

A J‐aggregate‐based Förster‐resonance energy‐transfer (FRET) method to investigate the release of high‐drug‐loading (50 wt %) and low‐drug‐loading (0.5 wt %) nanoparticles is reported. The high‐dye‐loading nanoparticles exhibited a slow release kinetics in serum and a relatively quick release in cells, demonstrating their great potential in drug de...

Hydrogels enable a variety of applications due to their dynamic networks, structural flexibility, and tailorable functionality. However, their mechanical performances are limited, specifically in the context of cellular mechanobiology. It is also difficult to fabricate robust gel networks with a long‐term durability. Thus, a new generation of soft...

The self‐assembly of inorganic nanoparticles into well‐ordered structures in the absence of solvents is generally hindered by van der Waals forces, leading to random aggregates between them. To address the problem, we functionalized rigid rare‐earth (RE) nanoparticles with a layer of flexible polymers by electrostatic complexation. Consequently, an...

A series of solvent‐free thermotropic liquid crystals are fabricated by the introduction of a flexible layer around the rigid core of rare‐earth nanomaterials. All of the engineered anisotropic fluids show typical nematic LC phases with size‐ and shape‐dependent microstructure. Such intrinsic ordering and fluidity endow these materials with unique...

Co‐precipitation is generally refers to the co‐precipitation of two solids and is widely used to prepare active‐loaded nanoparticles. Here, it is demonstrated that liquid and solid can precipitate simultaneously to produce hierarchical core–shell nanocapsules that encapsulate an oil core in a polymer shell. During the co‐precipitation process, the...

Ein einfacher Ansatz zur Nanofällung wird verwendet, um aus einer breiten Palette von Polymeren und Wirkstoffen Nanopartikel mit Medikamentenkern und Polymerhülle mit außergewöhnlich hoher Wirkstoffbeladung (bis zu 58.5 %) herzustellen. Diese Technik basiert auf der Abstimmung der Fällungszeit von Medikamenten und Polymeren mithilfe eines gemischte...

Poor solubility often leads to low drug efficacy. Encapsulation of water‐insoluble drugs in polymeric nanoparticles offers a solution. However, low drug loading remains a critical challenge. Now, a simple and robust sequential nanoprecipitation technology is used to produce stable drug‐core polymer‐shell nanoparticles with high drug loading (up to...

Here to stay: Biocompatible amphiphilic dimer particles with a hydrophobic polylactide (PLA) bulb and a hydrophilic shellac–PEG bulb behaved similarly to molecular surfactants. The size and diameter ratio of the dimer particles were readily tunable, providing flexible control over the water/oil interfacial curvature and thus the emulsion type. Emul...

Molecular‐surfactant‐stabilized emulsions are susceptible to coalescence and Ostwald ripening. Amphiphilic particles, which have a much stronger anchoring strength at the interface, could effectively alleviate these problems to form stable Pickering emulsions. Herein, we describe a versatile method to fabricate biocompatible amphiphilic dimer parti...

Lightweight and mechanically strong protein fibers are promising for many technical applications. Despite the widespread investigation of biological fibers based on spider silk and silkworm proteins, it remains a challenge to develop low‐cost proteins and convenient spinning technology for the fabrication of robust biological fibers. Since there ar...

In the B4 phase of bent-core liquid crystals, smectic layers of tilted achiral bent-core molecules are chiral and polar, which, driven by intra-layer structural mismatch, eventually twist into helical nanofilaments. We design a NOBOW/hexadecane organogel system, which is different from traditional organogel system, and the studied organogels show r...

Typical proteins for the formation of light weight and mechanically strong biological fibers are composed of folded rigid and un‐folded flexible units. In stark contrast to fibrous proteins, globular proteins are generally not regarded as a good candidate for fiber production due to their intrinsic structure defects. Thus, it is challenging to deve...

Proteins used for the formation of light weight and mechanically strong biological fibers are typically composed of folded rigid and unfolded flexible units. In contrast to fibrous proteins, globular proteins are generally not regarded as a good candidate for fiber production due to their intrinsic structural defects. Thus, it is challenging to dev...

The bola-amphiphilic, T-shaped mesogen CT2 has an aromatic, biphenyl core terminated on both ends by hydrophilic groups and a semi-perfluorinated, aliphatic side chain. Upon cooling from the isotropic phase, the fluorinated tails and the polar, rod-like cores nanophase-segregate to form a fluid lamellar phase. At high temperatures, the biphenyl cor...

Encapsulation of bioactive substances for extended shelf life and controlled, targeted release is critical for their applications in food and drug delivery. Here, a new method has been developed to encapsulate bioactive molecules in the crystal composites, showing greatly enhanced stability and unique pH-triggered response. Chlorophyll, a model bio...

Inspired by the helicoidally organized microstructure of stomatopods' smasher dactyl club, a type of impact-resistant composite film reinforced with periodic helicoidal nanofibers is designed and fabricated, which reproduces the structural complexity of the natural material. To periodically align nanofibers in a helicoidal structure, an electrospin...

Natural colorants, which impart a vivid color to food and add additional health benefits, are favored over synthetic colorants; however, their applications are limited by their low solubility in water and low stability. Here, we develop a versatile microfluidic strategy to encapsulate natural colorants in shellac nanoparticles with controlled physi...

Significance The use of increasingly sophisticated drugs to treat diseases like cancer often requires increasingly sophisticated delivery technologies, where multiple drugs often must be delivered simultaneously and in precise amounts; moreover, many drugs are hydrophobic and cannot be easily delivered. We report a simple and robust process to fabr...

Fabrication of biocompatible core-shell microcapsules in a controllable and scalable manner remains an important but challenging task. Here, we develop a one-step microfluidic approach for the high-throughput production of biocompatible microcapsules, which utilizes single emulsions as templates and controls the precipitation of biocompatible polym...

The ability to make stable water-in-oil and oil-in-water millimeter-size Pickering emulsions is demonstrated using Janus particles - particles with distinct surface chemistries. The use of a highly cross-linked hydrophobic polymer network and the excellent water wetting nature of a hydrogel as the hydrophobic and hydrophilic sides, respectively, pe...

Nanoparticle tumor accumulation relies on a key mechanism, the enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) effect, but it remains challenging to decipher the exact impact of the EPR effect. Animal models in combination with imaging modalities are useful, but it is impossible to delineate the roles of multiple biological barriers involved in nanoparti...

Three-dimensional (3D) tumor spheroids offer unprecedented capability for drug screening due to their unique features such as spatial 3D structure, relevant physiological responses, more complex intercellular network and stroma-cancer cell interactions. Microfluidic technology provides a facile strategy to make uniform tumor spheroids with potentia...

Precise engineering of nanoparticles with systematically varied properties (size, charge surface properties, targeting ligands, etc.) remains a challenge, limiting the effective optimization of nanoparticles for particular applications. Herein we report a single-step microfluidic combinatorial approach for producing a library of single and dual-lig...