Rejuvenation: an integrated approach to regenerative medicine

The word “rejuvenate” found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is (1) to make young or youthful again: give new vigor to, and (2) to restore to an original or new state. Regenerative medicine is the process of creating living, functional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. To accomplish this, approaches including transplantation, tissue engineering, cell therapy, and gene therapy are brought into action. These all use exogenously prepared materials to forcefully mend the failed organ. The adaptation of the materials in the host and their integration into the organ are all uncertain. It is a common sense that tissue injury in the younger is easily repaired and the acute injury is healed better and faster. Why does the elder have a diminished capacity of self-repairing, or why does chronic injury cause the loss of the self-repairing capacity? There must be some critical elements that are involved in the repair process, but are suppressed in the elder or under the chronic injury condition. Rejuvenation of the self-repair mechanism would be an ideal solution for functional recovery of the failed organ. To achieve this, it would involve renewal of the injury signaling, reestablishment of the communication and transportation system, recruitment of the materials for repairing, regeneration of the failed organ, and rehabilitation of the renewed organ. It thus would require a comprehensive understanding of developmental biology and a development of new approaches to activate the critical players to rejuvenate the self-repair mechanism in the elder or under chronic injury condition. Efforts focusing on rejuvenation would expect an alternative, if not a better, accomplishment in the regenerative medicine

Probabilistic inference of clone trees from multi-region sequencing of tumors

Cancer is a complex, adaptive system characterized by constantly evolving subclonal populations of cells as a result of somatic mutation accumulation and selective pressures. Because of this inherent evolutionary nature, modeling tumor subclonal architecture is crucial for understanding disease progression, therapeutic resistance, and relapse. The uncertainty in clonal composition and the multitude of possible ancestral relationships between clones pose statistical and computational challenges to the elucidation of the most probable evolutionary history from bulk tumor sequencing. Evolutionary analyses of tumors can be broken down into two main components: estimation of the proportion of cancer cells in a tumor that harbor a somatic mutation (cancer cell fraction, CCF) and the temporal ordering of somatic mutations. Existing methods have implemented various statistical and computational approaches including Bayesian mixture models, graph enumeration algorithms, and linear algebraic approaches. However, none are able to provide a comprehensive evolutionary analysis that characterizes uncertainty in all three areas: assignment of mutations to clusters, estimation of cancer cellular fractions of mutation clusters, and evolutionary relationships between clones. This thesis develops a new approach, PICTograph, that improves methodology for cancer cell fraction estimation and inference of clone trees from multi-sample data and evaluates uncertainty at each step of evolutionary analyses. PICTograph implements a Bayesian hierarchical model to quantify uncertainty in assigning mutations to subclones and sample posterior distributions of CCFs. Then to identify candidate evolutionary relationships between mutation clusters, PICTograph applies rules based on established evolutionary modeling principles to their estimated CCFs, effectively reducing the space of clone trees for full enumeration. Trees are evaluated using a fitness function, and the highest scoring trees are summarized to visualize the most probable ancestral relationships between mutation clusters. On simulated data, PICTograph performs better than existing methods in both CCF estimation and tree inference. Finally, I apply PICTograph to two multi-region datasets: whole-exome sequencing of intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms and longitudinal whole-exome sequencing of immunotherapy-treated non-small cell lung cancer

Free Cash Flows and Price Momentum

This study investigates the role of free cash flows and (cross-sectional and time-series) price momentum in predicting future stock returns. Past returns and free cash flows each positively predict future stock returns after controlling for the other, suggesting that cash flows and momentum both contain valuable and distinctive information about future stock returns. A strategy of buying past winners with high free cash flows and shorting past losers with low free cash flows significantly outperforms the traditional momentum trading strategy. The enhanced performance is not sensitive to investor sentiment, time variations, or transaction costs. Further analysis shows that the incremental cash flow effects are largely attributable to net distributions to equity/debt holders. Overall, our findings shed light on the role of corporate fundamentals in technical trading strategies

Interrelationship of Place of Residence and Peer Influence on Drinking Behavior

Alcohol abuse on most college campuses continues to be a problem. Alcohol abuse disrupts both the residential and the academic environment, resulting in housing professionals struggling to find ways to lessen the negative impact of alcohol abuse by college students. Educational programs reflect a continuum of approaches, ranging from attempting to teach students to drink responsibly to strictly adhering to the legal drinking age of 21 . However, they all share the common goal of striving to change the alcohol culture among university students, including within student housing. Some institutions, spurred on by the recent research of Pasch, Lindsay, Barnes, Liechty, and Koschoreck (2000) among others indicating that students living in alcohol-free housing experience fewer effects of secondhand drinking than do those in other student housing, and are attempting to reconfigure their halls to accomplish this goal. The purpose of this study was to examine students\u27 living environment, academic SUCCeSS variables data from a recent university-wide alcohol survey, and selected demographic variables to learn what variables contributed to student drinking behavior

Impact of After-School Activities on Meeting CDC Requirements in Virginian Adolescents

Aim: To assess the correlation between after-school program attendance and meeting the Center for Disease Control (CDC) requirement of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) per day. Background: Less than 50% of all children meet the CDC required amount of MVPA.1 Methods: Survey provided to 350 students in grades 6-12 describing participation in after-school programs Analysis: We will analyze how many students participate in the after-school programs and how long those programs dedicate to physical exercise. We will also analyze what type of exercise is performed. Limitations: We are limited to the students who are present in the classes we pass the surveys out to. Also, our data will only be analyzed on the surveys that are turned in complete

Predictors of Academic Success for Freshmen Residence Hall Students

Grade point average for residence hall freshmen (N = 1, 167; 52% male, 90% White, 74% in-state), is related significantly to precollege characteristics (high school rank, gender, ethnicity, parental education, divorced/separated parents, self-perception of abilities, expectation of honors or changing major) and environmental variables (learning community membership, academic college)

Kirigami-inspired, highly stretchable micro-supercapacitor patches fabricated by laser conversion and cutting.

The recent developments in material sciences and rational structural designs have advanced the field of compliant and deformable electronics systems. However, many of these systems are limited in either overall stretchability or areal coverage of functional components. Here, we design a construct inspired by Kirigami for highly deformable micro-supercapacitor patches with high areal coverages of electrode and electrolyte materials. These patches can be fabricated in simple and efficient steps by laser-assisted graphitic conversion and cutting. Because the Kirigami cuts significantly increase structural compliance, segments in the patches can buckle, rotate, bend and twist to accommodate large overall deformations with only a small strain (<3%) in active electrode areas. Electrochemical testing results have proved that electrical and electrochemical performances are preserved under large deformation, with less than 2% change in capacitance when the patch is elongated to 382.5% of its initial length. The high design flexibility can enable various types of electrical connections among an array of supercapacitors residing in one patch, by using different Kirigami designs

Tesigo [smart shopping cart]

Tesigo is an automated cart which is designed for carrying goods. It can be used in many areas such as a shopping mall, an airport, and a hospital. Tesigo can target a host and follow the host automatically. So far, there are no others robots like it and we believe both companies and customers will be satisfied with this design. Users can easily control Tesigo by using our mobile App. Our aim is to release users’ hands and give them an easier life