On December 18, Science Translational Medicine, a subsidiary of Science magazine in the United States, published the latest research results of the international cooperation team of Xie Tian, a professor of School of Medicine. Xie Tian is listed as the co-correspondent.

According to the data released by the World Health Organization in 2018, about 8.8 million people die of cancer every year in the world, accounting for nearly one sixth of the total deaths in the world every year. According to the number of deaths, the most common types of cancer are lung cancer and liver cancer.

In view of the statistics of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), liver cancer and lung cancer, with the highest morbidity and mortality, usually result to the function loss of tumor suppressor p53, which leads to chemotherapy resistance or invalidity. Therefore, the treatment of tumor caused by p53 deletion has always been a difficult problem for clinicians.

In response to this urgent problem, Omid farokhzad, Jinjun Shi, Tao Wei from Harvard Medical School and Xie Tian from our School of Medicine jointly developed a new cancer treatment method under the guidance of the thinking of "molecular compatibility" and "removing pathogenic factors and strengthening the healthy" in the combination of traditional Chinese and Western medicine. This work solves the two major problems of gene mutation risk in DNA therapy and the ineffectiveness of small molecule drugs in the absence of tumor suppressor genes, and has great clinical transformation potential.

In addition, a novel polymer nanoparticle carrier was created for the in delivery of p53 mRNA which helps the realization of the tumor inbihition effect after the the repair of p53 in a number of tumor models. At the same time, the rapid GSH responsive mRNA delivery system designed and developed in this study can achieve accurate, targeted and fast drug release at tumor, significantly improve drug concentration and antitumor efficacy in tumor tissues, accomplishing the goal of killing tumors to the maximum extent without damaging normal tissue cells.