Professor Bingyang Shi is the chair of nanomedicine and a biomedical engineer at the University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Engineering and IT. He is a global leader in nanomedicine for brain disease therapy.
Professor Shi’s research ambition is to overcome the difficulty of traversing the blood–brain barrier, successfully delivering therapeutic agents to treat cancers and other brain disease. The blood–brain barrier acts as a cellular barrier that prevents toxins, foreign materials and other dangerous molecules from entering the brain, however as a consequence this poses major challenges for getting therapeutic molecules into the brain. To overcome this, Professor Shi has developed several core patented technologies for brain delivery systems (e.g., Bio-NPs and Glu-NPs), set up collaboration networks across multiple countries, and fostered close connections with industry and hospital partners to drive the delivery of a bench-to-bedside pipeline to improve outcomes for individuals living with brain cancer.
Professor Shi’s research has delivered more than 100 scientific papers as a senior author in well-known journals including Nature Nanotechnology, Science Translational Medicine, Science Advances, and Nature Communications. His work has been cited more than 11,000 times worldwide. He has also invented several patented drug delivery technologies designed to carry gene therapies and other medicines across the blood brain barrier, leading to IIT (phrase 0) clinical trials.
Professor Shi founded and is the executive editor-in-chief of Exploration, a Wiley interdisciplinary journal with an Impact factor of 22.5. The journal explores new insights and methods at the nanoscale, inspiring multidisciplinary collaborations to address challenges in life sciences, medical sciences and physical sciences.
Research
More than 1,000 Australians are diagnosed with brain cancer each year, yet survival rates and quality of life have remained largely unchanged for decades. Current treatments are limited by the blood–brain barrier, high genetic variability between patients and a lack of therapies tailored to individual tumour biology.
The Fellowship program aims to deliver an Australia first personalised therapy platform for brain cancer, designed to maximise survival and quality of life.
Building on Professor Shi’s patented brain drug-delivery technologies, AI-driven target discovery tools and proven precision therapy strategies, he will establish a long-term, multidisciplinary translational research pipeline that integrates discovery, engineering and patient-responsive testing.
Professor Shi’s Rebecca Cooper Fellowship research will:
- identify patient-specific therapeutic targets using AI-enabled profiling of Australian brain cancer samples
- engineer scalable, clinic ready nanotherapeutics capable of crossing the blood–brain barrier
- validate treatments using next generation brain tumour-on-chip models that reflect patient-specific tumour biology and drug response.
This integrated approach will deliver a program of research that directly addresses the stagnant treatment pathway that has constrained progress in brain cancer therapy, while remaining adaptable to and capable of pioneering precision treatments for other debilitating neurological diseases.