Shijie Cao
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Trillions of bacteria live in the human gut and constantly send chemical messages to the body, strengthening the gut lining and tuning the immune system. Two kinds of messages matter most: pieces of the bacterial outer surface, and small molecules the bacteria make, such as short-chain fatty acids.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Pharmacology
- Topics
gut microbiome
outer membrane vesicles
nanoparticles
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Engineer synthetic microbiome mimics: polymer nanoparticles that release bacterial metabolites and are coated with outer membrane vesicles from chosen bacterial strains, with core and shell varied independently to separate structural from metabolic signals.
- Quantify how these mimics affect gut epithelial barrier integrity, immune regulation and the composition of the resident microbial community, testing in laboratory tissue models, ex vivo tissue and animals under healthy and dysbiotic conditions.
- Build a physiologically based pharmacokinetic–pharmacodynamic modeling framework that predicts intestinal transit, local exposure and concentration–response relationships for orally delivered particles.
- Design a nano-prodrug platform that releases short-chain fatty acids and tryptophan metabolites in the distal gut, where most commensal bacteria live, and pair it with pharmacokinetic modeling for precise gastrointestinal targeting.
- Determine the two-way interactions between microbiome composition and prodrug metabolism, testing how microbial variation alters drug release and response and how the delivered drugs shift microbial composition and metabolite output.
More about the research
Untangling which message does what is hard, because live bacteria behave unpredictably in the gut and most of the action happens far down the intestine, where it is difficult to deliver or measure anything. Both projects in this lab solve that problem with engineered nanoparticles that carry defined cargoes to defined parts of the gut, paired with computer models that predict where a particle travels and what concentration it reaches.
Why it matters
Oral drugs for gut diseases and chronic conditions often work unevenly between people and can disturb the gut's microbial community. A platform that delivers defined bacterial signals or prodrugs to a chosen stretch of intestine, paired with models that predict local drug exposure, could guide the design of oral therapies with customized release profiles and fewer microbiome side effects, and could clarify which microbial signals keep the gut barrier and immune system healthy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ravikumar Majeti
University of Alabama, AL·Pharmacology
Synthesize polyesters with controlled topologies and use them to probe transcytosis, the ferrying of particles through cells, at the gut-blood barrier across in vitro, in vivo, and in silico experiments in preclinical species.
Melinda Engevik
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify the bacterial compounds produced directly from the breakdown of mucin glycoproteins by gut bacteria, using metabolomics.
Na Li
University of Connecticut, CT·Pharmacology
Measure the particle drifting effect, where tiny drug particles aid absorption, in vitro and in vivo, and build mass transport and PBPK models to predict drug absorption from amorphous solid dispersions.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.