XI'AN, China, Feb. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- On January 26, the Laba Festival, which is deemed a prelude to the Spring Festival, Xi'an hosted the launch ceremony of the 2026 "Xi'an Year • Best of China – Digital Xi'an New Year" Spring Cultural and Tourism event series, along with the release of XR experiences and platform marketing initiatives, at the Xi'an XR Film Industry Base.
The event, organized by the Xi'an municipal government in collaboration with partnered enterprises and related organizations, marks the start of a New Year celebration that transcends the virtual and the real, the ancient and the modern. The event series, which will run from January through March 18, is designed to offer both residents and visitors a "visible, tangible, immersive, and takeaway-ready" digital Chinese New Year experience.
Spring Festival and cultural tourism reimagined: sharing a digital future
Xi'an' New Year event series launched six major platforms and five shopping scenarios that are tailored with marketing campaigns and shopping subsidies to present visitors with the "New Year red envelopes" to enjoy Xi'an to the fullest, bringing delights to the public and benefiting the businesses.
More than 150 cultural and tourism activities across the six categories of intangible heritage customs, food and shopping, lantern festivals and performances, museum learning, tourism leisure, and cultural public benefits will be held simultaneously, creating a citywide festive atmosphere.
Six major XR industry clusters in Xi'an have also launched a series of New Year digital experiences and public benefit initiatives. Using LBE (Location Based Entertainment) technology, participants are free to move and explore within designated areas, with their physical actions precisely mapped onto interactive historical scenes. This turns profound history into something tangible and participatory, shifting the experience from merely viewing relics to truly "traveling through history."
Platform synergy for targeted impact
The collaboration among six major platforms goes beyond simple traffic redirection. By leveraging their respective strengths and integrating resources, they deliver more thoughtful, affordable, and convenient full-scene experiences: travel platforms launch themed product packages, lifestyle platforms create themed packages, cross-border payment platforms optimize inbound tourism experiences, and retail platforms roll out themed promotions.
Xi'an warmly invites friends from around the world to join us in Xi'an, immerse themselves in this fusion of the real and the virtual, and experience both the authentic heart of Chinese tradition and the thrilling pulse of tomorrow, already here today.
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When Tech and Traditions Converge: Unlock a Digital Xi'an New Year in the Ancient Capital
HANGZHOU, China, April 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A team led by principal investigators Bobo Dang and Ting Zhou at Westlake University/Westlake Laboratory reported in Science a high-throughput platform for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. Their work, titled "A high-throughput selection system for fast-acting covalent protein drugs," opens new avenues for next-generation biologics.
Covalent small-molecule drugs have shown great success in cancer therapy by forming irreversible bonds with their targets. This has inspired efforts to extend covalent strategies to protein therapeutics, especially engineered miniproteins. However, their development is limited by a kinetic mismatch: Miniproteins are rapidly cleared in vivo, whereas covalent bond formation is typically slow. In addition, high-throughput platforms for systematically optimizing covalent protein reactivity have been lacking.
To address this challenge, the researchers proposed that precise spatial positioning of chemical warheads within protein scaffolds could enable molecular preorganization, thereby accelerating covalent bond formation without increasing intrinsic reactivity (Fig. 1).
Based on this concept, the team developed a high-throughput platform that combines yeast surface display with chemoselective protein modification to screen diverse crosslinkers and millions of protein variants. By optimizing warhead placement and the local chemical environment, the platform enables rapid and irreversible target engagement.
Using this platform, the researchers developed a covalent antagonist targeting PD-L1, termed IB101. Structural analysis revealed that IB101 forms a defined binding pocket that precisely positions the warhead in a reactive conformation, greatly accelerating covalent bond formation. Functionally, IB101 effectively blocks the PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint pathway and demonstrates strong antitumor activity in mouse models. Notably, despite its short in vivo half-life, IB101 achieves durable target engagement and tumor suppression, outperforming conventional antibody-based therapies under comparable conditions.
The platform was further applied to cytokine engineering, leading to the development of a covalent IL-18 variant, IB201. This engineered cytokine rapidly forms a covalent interaction with its receptor, enhancing signaling strength and duration. In vivo studies showed that IB201 induces potent antitumor immune responses without detectable systemic toxicity. These results highlight the potential of covalent engineering to improve the efficacy and safety of cytokine-based therapies.
Beyond immunotherapy targets, the platform was also applied to develop a covalent inhibitor targeting the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2. This molecule achieves durable viral neutralization, demonstrating the versatility of the approach across different therapeutic modalities.
This study establishes a general strategy for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. By enabling covalent bond formation on timescales compatible with rapid in vivo clearance, the platform overcomes a fundamental limitation in the field.
These findings provide a new framework for designing biologics with both rapid kinetics and sustained target engagement, with broad implications for cancer immunotherapy, antiviral therapy, and beyond.
Media Contact:
Chi Zhang
media@westlake.edu.cn
+86-15659837873
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Fast-Acting Covalent Protein Drugs From a New High-Throughput Platform
