Our people

Prof. Yuling Wang (group leader)

Yuling completed her PhD degree at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009. After graduation, she took up a postdoctoral position at Purdue University, working in the Bindely Bioscience Center on the project of Nanobiotechnology. After working at Purdue University for 22 months, she was awarded a prestigious Alexander von Humboldt fellowship (AvH) and worked at the University of Osnabrücker in Germany for 2 years. Following her AvH fellowship, she got an individual grant supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), working in the University of Duisburg-Essen on the topic of multiplexed cytokines detection with plasmonic nanostructures before commencing her ARC DECRA fellowship in 2014. Towards the end of her ARC DECRA Fellow, she was appointed as a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in 2017 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. She is also a Chief Investigator within ARC Center of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP) and leads the SERS program for in vitro diagnostics.

Research Interests

Plasmonic nanostructures for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy
Biomarker sensing for point-of-care diagnostics
Personalized nanomedicine

Meet the team

Medical research officer

Audrey Nadalini

Audrey completed her Bachelor of Biomedical Science (Honours) degree in 2021 at The Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney, Australia. After graduation, Audrey was offered a Research Assistant position to join the Cancer Matrix and Metastasis team at Garvan, where she was analysing the role of extracellular matrix proteins in producing scar tissue in triple negative breast cancer metastases. Audrey has recently been appointed as Medical Research Officer in 2023 at Professor Yuling Wang’s lab, where she will be acting as liaison between clinical oncologists and research staff and students as part of an ongoing breast cancer study.

Research:

In the study, blood samples will be obtained from a collaboration with Australian Red Cross Lifeblood and Macquarie University Hospital to determine the genomics, proteomics and glycomics signatures of small extracellular vesicles (SEVs) of metastatic breast cancer patients treated with CDK4/6 inhibitor drugs. The aim is to further enhance understanding of CDK4/6 resistance mechanisms.

Research and teaching fellows

Su Su Thae Hnit

Su Su Thae Hnit completed Bachelor of Medical Science (Honours) degree in 2013 and Doctor of Philosophy (Science) in 2018 at the School of Science and Health, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia. After graduation, Su Su Thae Hnit was offered a Post Doctoral position to join Chinese Medicine Anti-Cancer Evaluation Program by Associate Professor Qihan Dong, Greg Brown Laboratory, Central Clinical School and Charles Perkins Centre, The University of Sydney. Su Su Thae Hnit has recently been appointed as Research and Teaching Fellow in 2022 at Associate Professor Yuling Wang’s lab, School of Natural Science, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University.

Research:

Su Su’s research interest is identifying the chemical components of plants with the ability of impeding cancer cell proliferation for treatment and prevention of cancer. Su Su will be working on developing the innovative technology to detect the protein targets of chemicals in a rapid and sensitive manner by surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and identifying the intracellular location of proteins interacting with chemicals in various types of cancer cells by using proteomics tools via Australian Proteome Analysis Facility (APAF).

Postdoctoral fellows

Nana Lyu

Nana obtained her Bachelor’s Degree of Science in 2013 majoring in Pharmacy at Shenyang Pharmaceutical University (China). After that, she continued studying for postgraduate professional course in the department of Pharmaceutics (Prof. Dawei Chen) and then moved to Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences for 2-year cooperative training in Center for Drug Delivery System (Prof. Jiwen Zhang). Her master’s project focused on preparation of γ-cyclodextrin metal-organic frameworks (γ-CD-MOF) nanocrystals and their applications in sustained drug delivery. She graduated with her Master of Pharmacy in 2016 at Shenyang Pharmaceutical University and recieved her PhD at Macquarie University in 2022. Nana is currently working in Dr. Yuling Wang’s group and her project focuses on characterization of liquid biopsy for cancer diagnosis and treatment response by surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS).

Research:

Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and/or circulating tumor cells (CTCs), which can be collected noninvasively as liquid biopsy, represents a precious source of biological material for cancer diagnostics and monitoring the treatment responses. Characterising the genotypic/phenotypic evolution of cancer cells can help to understand the mechanisms of drug resistance and disease recurrence, which eventually benefit the development of personalized medicine and new drug treatments. However, real-time monitoring of ctDNA mutation and CTC phenotypic evolution during disease progression and treatment keeps a challenge due to their rarity and the vast heterogeneity. Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is one of the new and most promising tools to address this global issue. SERS nanotags can serve as an ideal label for screening a panel of cancer specific biomarkers (ctDNA and CTCs) due to its super sensitivity (down to single molecule), the unique and narrow Raman spectral peaks (fingerprints), photostability and single laser excitation. Thus, we aims to design and synthesize multiple-colored SERS nanotags for sensitive analysis of a panel of ctDNA and phenotypic evaluation of CTCs by using colorectal cancer as a model system. We have synthesized SERS nanotags with 6 distinctive fingerprints. At the starting stage, we amplify and detect the BRAF V600E mutation in cell lines by PCR/SERS assay and characterise the cell surface marker with antibody conjugated SERS nanotags to fabricate the proof-of-concept method for further genotype ctDNA and phenotype CTCs in multiplex.

Mohammad Tavakkoliyaraki

Dr. Mohammad Tavakkoliyaraki joined Professor Yuling Wang’s lab in November 2021. He has received Macquarie University Research Fellowship (MQRF). In the next 3 years of his fellowship, he will be developing ultrasensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering substrates/tags for detecting protein and glycan biomarkers on cancer cells and their released extracellular vesicles in an integrated system. Mohammad is an alumnus of National University of Singapore, having received his PhD in plasmon-enhanced processes for diagnosis and therapy of cancer in 2020. Mohammad has 12+ years of experience doing research in both academia and industry. His research interests are developing plasmonic nanomaterials, charge-transfer induced SERS enhancement, photocatalysts, antibacterial nanomaterials, drug delivery systems and polymeric nanocomposites..

Research:

Molecular mapping of protein and glycan biomarkers on surface of cells and their derived extracellular vesicles is of great importance from many scientific aspects. In this project, plasmonic nanoparticles will be used as main nanomaterials to develop ultrasensitive and ultra-stable surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) nanotags with distinct Raman signal, enabling multiplex detection of different biomarkers in one test.

In another project, Mohammad will employ diferent nanomaterials to further enhance the SERS signal as well as colloiodal stability of plasmonic SERS nanotags through charge transfer process.

Amin Hassanzadehbarforoushi

Dr Amin Hassan-Zadeh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the nanosensors group at the School of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University. He is an expert in applying multidisciplinary research using microfluidics as a tool to develop cutting edge diagnostics and therapeutic systems. Before joining Macquarie, he was a Mitacs Elevate postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia Life Sciences Institute and Amgen-British Columbia in Vancouver Canada where he developed a high throughput microencapsulation technique for accelerated single B cell-based screening and antibody discovery. He received his PhD from the University of New South Wales. At UNSW he developed microfluidic capillary systems for cell confinement enabling tracking the dynamic behavior of cells at the tissue and single cell levels. His research has led to understand the cell-cell interaction and intercellular heterogeneity in disease such as Cancer, Myocardial Infarction, and neurodegenerative disease. His work to date has been published in top-tier journals including Lab Chip, ACS Sensors, and Biosensors & Bioelectronics.

Research:

At Macquarie University, he will be leading the development of integrated microfluidic-nanomaterial platforms for 1) multi-omics analysis of extracellular vesicles for real-time monitoring of patient treatment in breast cancer and 2) multi-omics analysis of exosomes in host-pathogen interaction at the single cell level to understand how the molecular features of exosomes support their mediation function.

Wei Zhang

Wei received his bachelor of pharmaceutical engineering from Southwest Jiaotong University in 2011 and got his master’s degree of biochemical engineering from Shenyang Pharmaceutical University in 2014. Then he worked in Shanghai Aucta pharmaceuticals Co., LTD on drug formulation development for 3 years, before he started his PhD study in department of Molecular Science at Macquarie University from February, 2018. Wei is currently working on the phenotypic evaluation of exosomes for cancer diagnostics and therapy.

Research:

Exosomes are a kind of most important cancer biomarkers. They existed in most of body fluids including blood, urine and saliva, holding great potential to serve as indicators for cancer diagnosis and therapy. Exosomes are very small (30-150 nm) and heterogeneous, it is challenging to detect exosomes using traditional methods due to their limited multiplexing capability or sensitivity. Herein, we propose a new method to use Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) for simultaneously labelling and monitoring of the multiple surface markers (proteins and glycans) on exosomes from pancreatic cancer for early cancer diagnosis. With three cell surface biomarkers on exosome, we will profile the expression of the exosome surface biomarkers in response to therapy, further apply this technique for cancer diagnosis and patient health monitoring.

PhD candidates

Anastasiia Tukova

In 2016 Anastasiia acquired bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering in St.-Petersburg State Chemical-Pharmaceutical University (Russia), where she has received first class honours diploma. After graduation she worked as Chemical Engineer in the Saint-Petersburg State Research Institute of Vaccines and Serums. In 2018 she acquired a Master of Professional Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in University of Sydney. As a part of her master’s program she participated in biomedical exchange project with the Biotech laboratory in University of Trento (Italy), where took part in the research of protein-based scaffolds for tissue engineering. In 2021 she finished her Master of Research program in Macquarie University and started PhD with the project aimed to analyse how gold nanoparticles fundamentally interact with proteins via advanced characterization of gold nanoparticles after preincubation with BSA and their toxicological profile to control their biological behaviour and properties.

Research:

Gold nanoparticles is a very effective platform for the diagnosis, treatment, and drug delivery. Gold nanoparticles have the potential to be used in different biomedical application from diagnostics to drug delivery and direct treatment. However, their in vivo application is often limited due to insufficient delivery to a specific target, cellular toxicity and unpredictable pharmacokinetics. These unfavorable events caused by interactions between gold nanoparticles and biomolecules of biological media, often called "protein corona". The protein layers adsorbed on the surface of nanoparticles affect the biological identity and alters their function and properties. Reliable methods to understand protein corona interaction with nanoparticles is need to be developed since it alters their desired properties. Hence, my goal is to characterize gold nanoparticles-protein interaction in biological media.

Shriya Agarwal

Shriya received her Bachelor’s in Biotechnology from Noida Institute of Engineering and Technology (NIET), India, in 2017. Later, she received her Master’s in Biotechnology from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology (JIIT), India, in 2019 where she worked for 2-years on fabricating, optimizing and validating the suitable nanocarrier system for neurological, oncological and transdermal applications exploring various modes of drug delivery system like– polymeric and gold nanoparticles, nanogels and hydrogels, microspheres, essential oils and microemulsions and studied their effects on various cell lines along with their computational validation. She is currently working on the characterization of exosomes for proteomics and glycomics.

Research:

Small extracellular vesicles (EVs) or exosomes are lipid bilayer membrane vesicles (40-200 nm in diameter) generated inside multivesicular bodies (MVBs), which are secreted by fusion with the cell membrane. These small vesicles contain numerous DNAs, RNAs, proteins and lipids. Thus, small EVs can act as messengers and carriers of important signals for cell-to-cell communication, modification of the target cell functions in normal physiology as well as in diseased state. Additionally, molecular constituents in small EVs have been found to be associated with tumor growth, tumorigenesis, angiogenesis, tumor immune escape, drug resistance and metastasis. Therefore, characterization of small EVs at a molecular level is essential to reveal their functions. In recent years, surface proteins and glycans of cancer derived small EVs have been of great interest as cancer diagnostics, since the surface of small EVs may display relevant membrane proteins and glycans derived from the original cancer cells. Moreover, small EVs have been detected in almost all body fluids, including blood, urine and saliva, thus holding significant potential to serve as a liquid biopsy biomarker for different diseases including cancer. However, due to the high heterogeneity and low level of small EVs in body fluids, there is a high demand for sensitive detection and characterization of such vesicles at a molecular level. Thus, this project aims to collect, purify the cancer-derived small EVs from cancer cell lines, and characterize the EVs by using various techniques including transmission electron microscopy (TEM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), Nanosight, nanopore, mass spectrometry for proteomics and glycomics.

Long Ngo

Long received his Bachelor of Science from International University – National University of Ho Chi Minh city in 2019. Then he started studying Master of Biotechnology and Business in Macquarie University for one and a half years, before he started his MRes project in department of Molecular Science at Macquarie University in 2021. Long is currently working on the science project of detecting cancer derived exosomes by gold nanoprobes.

Research:

Exosomes are the smallest extracellular vesicles with a size from 30 – 150 nm. They act as cargo to deliver biomaterials (e.g. DNA, RNA, proteins) from cell to cell. Moreover, exosomes are secreted by all cells, even cancer cells, and appear in most body fluids such as blood, plasma, urine, etc. Hence, cancer-derived exosomes could be the new non-invasive biomarkers, and there are increasing studies on their molecule features. My interest is using SERS nanoprobe to detect the molecular features of exosomes which provide useful information for diagnosing cancer.

Laura Marcela Rey Gomez

Laura received her Bachelor of Biomedical Science from The University of Technology, Sydney in 2018. She earned her Bachelor of Honours in Cell Pathology from the University of Sydney in 2019 with the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, where she investigated the role of glycans in the clearance of platelet microparticles. In 2020, she was hired as a Research Assistant at Lifeblood to continue her honours work until 2021, when she joined Macquarie University as a Master of Research student to work on the development of a lateral flow immunoassay to detect blood biomarkers in a new collaboration with Lifeblood.

Research:

COVID-19 is caused by the highly contagious severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pathogen. It was first described in December 2019 as a novel β-coronavirus. In 2021, various vaccines are being administered globally to provide active immunity. Currently tracking of vaccine efficacy can only be conducted using expensive, time-consuming, and labour-intensive assays. Lateral Flow Immunoassays (LFAs) are one alternative method that can be used. LFAs are adaptable, affordable, rapid, have an easy readout and require minimal sample preparation. This project aims to develop a rapid and affordable LFA to screen for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 using gold nanoparticles with a view to determine the efficacy of vaccine administration. Even though many LFAs are being developed, we aim to use a unique barcode design to perform a semi-quantitative detection of IgG, IgM, and IgA antibodies. Various parts of the virus, such as the S1, N proteins or the receptor-binding domain (RBD) peptide will be explored to obtain the most specific and sensitive combination. To determine assay specificity and sensitivity performance known pre- and post-COVID-19 samples will be obtained from a collaboration with Australian Red Cross Lifeblood. This project intends to deliver an adaptable barcode style LFA that can initially be used to rapidly and affordably detect SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to monitor the duration of immunity following vaccine administration. However, this proof-of-concept design may be adapted in the future to screen other viruses and/or perform vaccine monitoring for other infectious agents.

Muhammad Waqas Salim

Waqas received his bachelor’s degree from University of Peshawar, Pakistan in 2015 in the field of Pharmaceutical Sciences. After graduation he worked as a research officer for a pharmaceutical company for 2 years. In 2019 he completed his M.Phil. in Pharmaceutics from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan where he worked on transdermal drug delivery using lipid-based drug delivery systems (transfersomes). After completing his Masters, he joined government service as Drug Inspector in Pakistan. In February 2022 he joined the Nanosensors Group at Macquarie University, Australia for a PhD Degree where he is working on EVs role in neurodegenerative diseases.

Research:

Waqas is working on the Role of EVs in Neurodegenerative Diseases and their potential use in drug delivery applications. EVs have unique physical and biological properties that enable them to play an important role in neurodegeneration and they have the potential to be used as drug carriers for delivery at the target site. The work will be done in two phases where the first phase is Harvesting EVs from different brain cell types (i.e., microglia, neurons, astrocytes) which will be done in collaboration of Dr. Andrew Care at University of Technology Sydney. Second phase includes characterization of the physical and biological properties of brain cell-derived EVS and exploring their use in drug delivery applications which will be done under the supervision of A.Prof Yuling Wang at the Macquarie University.

Master Students

Thi Tuyet Nhung Nguyen

Nhung completed her bachelor on teaching chemistry at Ho Chi Minh City University (Vietnam) in 2006. Following that, she received a master degree of science in Analytical Chemistry at Vietnam National University (Vietnam) in 2009 when she updated various analytical techniques and attached to projects on analysis of persistent organic pollutants in different matrices in the environment. After graduation, she has worked as a chemistry lecturer at the Faculty of Chemistry, Ho Chi Minh City University (Vietnam) for 10 years before coming to Australia. In 2022, she accomplished a master degree of Science Innovation in Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences at Macquarie University and worked on a project of multiplex application of surface-enhanced Raman scattering nanotags. She is now in the second year of Master of Research at School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University.

Research:

In the project, homogenous plasmonic nanoparticles will be synthesized to ensure high sensitivity and multiplex capability of SERS nanotags for conjugation with lectins and antibodies, aiming for proteomics and glycomics analysis of exosomes. Recent studies suggest exosomes as important messengers in intercellular communication. The project will present bioconjugation strategies of labelling lectins and antibodies rolling in disease and infection development on the surface of SERS nanotags. In addition, molecular barcoding of exosomes using these SERS nanotags - antibodies or lectins will be achieved based on the distinct fingerprints.

Bachelor students

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