Heal, Fuel, and Feed the World: Advances in Nanobiotechnology

In recent years, we have witnessed an increased interest in nanobiotechnology. The creation and manipulation of functional components, surfaces, structure and modality at the nanoscale have demonstrated their great successes in accelerating the development in biotechnology, which harnesses cellular and bimolecular process, provides engineered cues to combat with diseases, creates cleaner fuels, and increase farming yields, etc. To fill the unmet needs, the State Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering (SKLBCE), along with other top institutes around the world, ushered in the era of nanobiotechnology to boost the development of bio-manufacture, bio-separation, and biomedical engineering. We have established various unique techniques such as membrane emulsification, multishell formation, nanocrystallization and a self-assembly approach to prepare nanoparticles with uniform sizes and controllable structures. These nanoparticles have been utilized in fundamental research as well as industrial applications on enzyme immobilization, high-throughput protein separation, controlled release, targeted diagnoses, and delivery of antigens, siRNA and anti-cancer drugs. To galvanize the promotion and translation of nanobiotechnology in the early stage of the product, we kept close collaborations with major corporations, such as GE Healthcare, Unilever, Sanofi-Pasteur, Pfizer, Hualan Biological Engineering, Sinopharm A-THINK Pharmaceutical, Senhui Microsphere Tech, Beijing Huili Tech, and other companies. With the great advances, various results have been translated from our laboratories to the companies for industrialization and commercialization, such as anticancer delivery systems, vaccine adjuvants, separation media for vaccines and proteins, PEGylated protein/peptide drugs, multi-column protein separation system, and so forth in SKLBCE. This special issue highlights the advances in nanobiotechnology across a wide range of themes, including biofuel and bio-inspired energy devices, targeted drug delivery, tissue engineering, stimuli-sensitive biosensors, theranostics, and the construction of novel nanostructures, which hold great promise in biological applications. It is composed of 4 review-type articles and 15 research articles by the colleagues from SKLBCE, University of Washington, TU Dresden, Nanyang Technological University, Seoul National University, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry, CAS, and the National Center for Nanoscience & Technology. We are honored to guest edit this special issue, and thank all authors and referees for their excellent work and unyielding supports. Meanwhile, our appreciation goes to the Small editorial team for their enthusiastic dedication and professional editing. Contributions from our colleagues at SKLBCE and other cooperated institutes and corporations are also sincerely appreciated. Nanobiotechnology has opened up whole new dimensions of manufacture, agriculture and medical intervention, but the wide applications of nanobiotechnology still leave much effort to be made. By searching for multi-disciplinary techniques and tightening the cooperation with academics and industrials across the world, we will continue to exploit the full potential of nanobiotechnology to better heal, fuel, and feed the world! Guang-Hui Ma received her Ph.D in Polymer Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1993. She is a director of the State Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her interests include bioformulation and biomaterials. Her expertise lies in the preparation of uniform-sized and structure-controllable nano-/micro-particles for bioseparation media, controlled release carriers, enzyme immobilization, and vaccine adjuvants. Dan Wang graduated from Jilin University in 1994. He entered a master's degree program at his alma mater in the same year. He obtained his Ph.D. from Yamanashi University in Japan in 2001. He conducted his post-doctoral research at Kochi University, Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth and Kyoto University, successively. He was awarded by Hundred Talent Program of the CAS, and served as professor of the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS in February 2004. In recent years, he has mainly focused on the design and controllable synthesis of functional inorganic materials with porous or hollow structures, and their applications in solar cells, Li-ion batteries and photocatalysts, drug delivery, biosensors, and gas sensors, etc.