Min Jiang

Min Jiang is currently a second-year PhD student at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, under the supervision of Professor Olivia M. Merkel. She obtained both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in pharmaceutical science at Sichuan University in China, consecutively from 2015 to 2022, with Professor Xun Sun as her mentor.

Over the past six years, Min has been dedicated to the development of vaccine delivery systems for diverse antigen types. At the beginning of her master's studies, she designed an antigen self-assembled nanovaccine with the ability to target dendritic cells to enhance cellular immunity against cancer. After recognizing the issue of vaccine hesitancy still due to needle phobia and sharp pain, she then redirected her research towards the development of transdermal vaccines. Her approach involved the integration of pathogen-like vaccines into polymeric microneedles, thus improving compliance, as well as the vaccine efficacy of subunit antigens. To date, Min has published two research papers as the first author regarding her research work.

With the outbreak of Covid-19, mRNA vaccines have taken the forefront in vaccine development and manufacturing, showing superior advantages in effective responses to sudden epidemics. To address the challenge of limited mucosal immunity related to mRNA vaccines administered via intramuscular or subcutaneous injection, Min is currently focusing on the pulmonary delivery of mRNA nanovaccines using polymer-based systems and will keep working to develop applicable dosage forms for lung diseases.