Hai-Quan Mao

About

Hai-Quan Mao is a professor of materials science and engineering and the director of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his work engineering novel nanomaterials for regenerative medicine and therapy delivery applications. Mao holds a joint appointment in the Translational Tissue Engineering Center and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Medicine. His research in regenerative engineering includes developing nanofiber scaffolds from synthetic and natural biomaterials for liver tissue engineering, stem cell expansion and differentiation, and soft tissue regeneration. He has discovered a synergistic effect between nanofiber topography and biochemical cues on the proliferation of human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, invented a more efficient HSC expansion method enabling various HSC-based cellular therapies, and engineered methods for promoting lineage-specific differentiation of neural (crest) stem cells. Additionally, Mao has developed tailored, nanofiber-based scaffolds for vascular engineering, skeletal muscle regeneration, spinal cord repair, and peripheral nerve regeneration. In therapeutic engineering, his contributions include understanding nanoparticle assembly mechanisms from polyelectrolyte complexes with plasmid DNA, RNA, or protein therapeutics, engineering DNA nanoparticles with tunable shapes that mimic natural viral particles, and developing scalable production methods for these…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Cell biology
• Chemistry
• Biology
• Biochemistry
• Optics
• Materials science
• Biophysics
• Computational biology
• Physics

Selected publications

• Application of conductive PPy/SF composite scaffold and electrical stimulation for neural tissue engineering

  Biomaterials · 2020-06-06 · 294 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Payload distribution and capacity of mRNA lipid nanoparticles

  Nature Communications · 2022 · 275 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are effective vehicles to deliver mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. It has been challenging to assess mRNA packaging characteristics in LNPs, including payload distribution and capacity, which are critical to understanding structure-property-function relationships for further carrier development. Here, we report a method based on the multi-laser cylindrical illumination confocal spectroscopy (CICS) technique to examine mRNA and lipid contents in LNP formulations at the s…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Effects of Mesenchymal Stem Cell‐Derived Paracrine Signals and Their Delivery Strategies

  Advanced Healthcare Materials · 2021-01-12 · 236 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been widely studied as a versatile cell source for tissue regeneration and remodeling due to their potent bioactivity, which includes modulation of inflammation response, macrophage polarization toward proregenerative lineage, promotion of angiogenesis, and reduction in fibrosis. This review focuses on profiling the effects of paracrine signals of MSCs, commonly referred to as the secretome, and highlighting the various engineering approaches to tune the MSC se…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Multi-step screening of DNA/lipid nanoparticles and co-delivery with siRNA to enhance and prolong gene expression

  Nature Communications · 2022 · 123 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Lipid nanoparticles hold great potential as an effective non-viral vector for nucleic acid-based gene therapy. Plasmid DNA delivery can result in extended transgene expression compared to mRNA-based technologies, yet there is a lack of systematic investigation into lipid nanoparticle compositions for plasmid DNA delivery. Here, we report a multi-step screening platform to identify optimized plasmid DNA lipid nanoparticles for liver-targeted transgene expression. To achieve this, we analyze the r…

  DOI

• An mRNA lipid nanoparticle-incorporated nanofiber-hydrogel composite for cancer immunotherapy

  Nature Communications · 2025-07-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Hydrogel materials have emerged as versatile platforms for various biomedical applications. Notably, the engineered nanofiber-hydrogel composite (NHC) has proven effective in mimicking the soft tissue extracellular matrix, facilitating substantial recruitment of host immune cells and the formation of a local immunostimulatory microenvironment. Leveraging this feature, here we report an mRNA lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-incorporated NHC microgel matrix, termed LiNx, by incorporating LNPs loaded with…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R21EB015152

  NIH · $437k · 2015

• Biomimetic Matrix for Ex Vivo and In Vivo Activation of T Cells

  NIH · $1.9M · 2020–2025

• Shape Control and Transport Properties of DNA-Copolymer Micelles

  NIH · $1.5M · 2015–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Kam W. Leong

  218 shared

• Sami Tuffaha

  Johns Hopkins University

  127 shared

• Ahmet Höke

  Johns Hopkins University

  119 shared

• Chenhu Qiu

  Johns Hopkins University

  113 shared

• Sashank Reddy

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  98 shared

• Nicholas von Guionneau

  Johns Hopkins University

  88 shared

• Russell Martin

  78 shared

• Yizong Hu

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  72 shared

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biomedical Engineering

  Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

  1998

• Ph.D., Department of Chemistry

  Wuhan University

  1993

• B.S., Department of Chemistry

  Wuhan University

  1988

Awards & honors

• Young Investigator Award at the National University of Singa…
• National Science Foundation Faculty CAREER Award (2008)
• Johns Hopkins University’s Cohen Translational Engineering A…
• Johns Hopkins University’s Cohen Translational Engineering A…
• Louis B. Thalheimer Award for Translational Research (2016)

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