Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disease. It was prevalently perceived that Th2 cells played the crucial role in asthma pathogenesis, which has been identified as the important target for anti-asthma therapy. The soluble IL-4 receptor (sIL-4R), which is the decoy receptor for Th2 cytokine IL-4, has been reported to be effective in treating asthma in phase I/II clinical trail. To develop more efficacious anti-asthma agent, we attempt to test whether the Helicobacter pylori neutrophil-activating protein (HP-NAP), a novel TLR2 agonist, would enhance the efficacy of sIL-4R in anti-asthma therapy. In our work, we constructed a pcDNA3.1-sIL-4R-NAP plasmid, named PSN, encoding fusion protein of murine sIL-4R and HP-NAP. PSN significantly inhibited airway inflammation, decreased the serum OVA-specific IgE levels and remodeled the Th1/Th2 balance. Notably, PSN is more effective on anti-asthma therapy comparing with plasmid only expressing sIL-4R.

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Polyolefin elastomers (POEs) and cyclic olefin copolymers (COCs) are high-performance polyolefin materials of wide interest. It is crucial to develop low-cost and high-performance transition metal catalysts to prepare these polyolefin materials. In this contribution, we designed and synthesized a series of bidentate pyridyl-amido hafnium catalysts and used them in ethylene polymerization and copolymerization with comonomers including 1-octene and norbornene. These catalysts exhibited high activities of up to 16.3 × 10 6 g mol À 1 h À 1 and produced polyethylene with a high molecular weight of up to 24.5 × 10 4 g mol À 1 in ethylene polymerization at 150 °C. More importantly, these catalysts produced ethylene/1-octene copolymers with incorporation of up to 13.7 mol % and molecular weight of up to 72.7 × 10 4 g mol À 1 , and prepared ethylene/ norbornene copolymers with incorporation of up to 50.3 mol %, along with glass transition temperature of up to 184.3 °C and molecular weight of up to 187.6 × 10 4 g mol À 1 . The ease of synthesis, high versatility and great copolymerization properties of these hafnium catalysts make them highly attractive for future studies.

Porous organometallic nanomaterials are a new class of materials based on a three-dimensional structure. They have excellent applications in different fields, but their applications in gas storage and separation have not been fully developed. CO2 adsorption storage and hydrocarbon separation has been a challenging industrial problem. Several typical molecular adsorbents have been used to study the separation, but the problems of long-term stability, high selectivity and synthetic complexity of these adsorbents remain to be solved. Here, we have designed and synthesized tetrahedral metal supramolecular nanocage with custom cavities based on the unique rigid structure of triptycene derivatives. Using the unique discrete porous structure of tetrahedral metal nanocages, the gas adsorption and separation performance of the metal supramolecular nanocage was investigated. By analyzing the adsorption and desorption isotherms and the multi-component competitive adsorption curves, we noticed that the tetrahedral supramolecular nanocages had good CO2 storage capacity and good separation capacity for C2H2/CO2 and C2H2/N2. All these indicate that porous organic metal nanomaterials are expected to be a new energy saving separation material.

The introduction of a secondary interaction is an efficient strategy to modulate transition-metal-catalyzed ethylene (co)polymerization. In this contribution, O-donor groups were suspended on amine–imine ligands to synthesize a series of nickel complexes. By adjusting the interaction between the nickel metal center and the O-donor group on the ligands, these nickel complexes exhibited high activities for ethylene polymerization (up to 3.48 × 106 gPE·molNi –1·h–1) with high molecular weight up to 5.59 × 105 g·mol–1 and produced good polyethylene elastomers (strain recovery (SR) = 69–81%). In addition, these nickel complexes can catalyze the copolymerization of ethylene with vinyl acetic acid, 6-chloro-1-hexene, 10-undecylenic, 10-undecenoic acid, and 10-undecylenic alcohol to prepare the functionalized polyolefins.