Recent Advances about Local Gene Delivery by Ultrasound

Gene therapy has been widely explored as a pharmacological approach, with a great potential to treat various diseases. Generally, many diseases have definite lesion’s site, especially for tumors. This feature results in a great demand on the delivery of therapeutic gene to the local lesion’s site. Ultrasound combined with microbubbles provides a promising platform to deliver gene in a spatiotemporally controlled way. Ultrasound beam can be positioned and targeted onto the deep-seated lesion’s site of diseases by an external mobile transducer. Microbubbles can serve as vehicles for carrying genetic cargo and can be destructed by ultrasound, resulting in the local release of genetic payload. Meanwhile, sonoporation effect will occur upon which the bubbles are exposed to the appropriate ultrasonic energy, producing the transient small holes on the adjacent cell membrane and thus increasing the vascular and cellular permeability. In this chapter, we will review the recent advances about local gene delivery by ultrasound

Tuning Topological Surface States by Charge Transfer

Three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators (TIs), Bi2Se3, Bi2Te3, Sb2Te3, are a class of materials that has non-trivial bulk band structure and metallic surface states. Access to charge transport through Dirac surface states in TIs can be challenging due to their intermixing with bulk states or non-topological two-dimensional electron gas quantum well states caused by bending of electronic bands near the surface. The band bending arises via charge transfer from surface adatoms or interfaces and, therefore, the choice of layers abutting topological surfaces is critical. Surfaces of these 3D TIs have also been proposed to host new quantum phases at the interfaces with other types of materials, provided that the topological properties of interfacial regions remain unperturbed. This thesis presents a systematic experimental study of both bulk conducting and surface charge transfer problems. We started with optimizing growth condition of Bi2Se3 on various substrates, to achieve best quality of Bi2Se3 single layers we can get. We then move on to growth of Bi2Se3/ZnxCd1-xSe bilayers. Here we improved lattice mismatch between Bi2Se3 and ZnxCd1-xSe layers by tuning lattice parameter of ZnxCd1-xSe. After that, we achieved molecular beam epitaxial growth of Bi2Se3/ZnxCd1-xSe superlattices that hold only one topological surface channel per TI layer. The topological nature of conducting channels is supported by π-Berry phase evident from observed Shubnikov de Haas quantum oscillations and by the associated two-dimensional weak antilocalization quantum interference correction to magnetoresistance. Both density functional theory calculations and transport measurements suggest that a single topological Dirac cone per TI layer can be realized by asymmetric interfaces: Se-terminated ZnxCd1-xSe interface with the TI remains `electronically intact\u27, while charge transfer occurs at the Zn-terminated interface. Our findings indicate that topological transport could be controlled by adjusting charge transfer from non-topological spacers in hybrid structures. The first chapter contains a brief introduction to TIs. It describes basic concepts and notations used later in the bulk of the thesis. These include the topological surface states of a TI, crystal structure of 3D TIs, the origin of defects and their effects on transport study. The second chapter presents experimental techniques employed for growth and for structural, and electrical characterization of the 3D TIs thin films and superlattices. First, every component of our custom-designed molecular beam epitaxy system will be described in detail, and then the important in situ surface morphology monitoring tool -- RHEED will also be mentioned, as well as high resolution X-ray diffraction (XRD). In the second part, a standard procedure for device fabrication will be presented. The last part will focus on the electron transport measurement setup and various techniques for characterization. In the third chapter we present explorations of different substrates for growth of Bi2Se3 thin films, describe growth of Bi2Se3 thin films on sapphire, GaAs(111), InP(001) and InP(111), then optimize growth conditions accordingly. The quality of films are investigated to study the effects of substrates on quality of the films. The fourth chapter is a growth study of superlattice of a TI with a traditional II-VI semiconductor, Bi2Se3/ZnxCd1-xSe. we explore II-VI semiconductor family and study the optimal material to grow on top of Bi2Se3. Then we focus on the growth of Bi2Se3/ZnxCd1-xSe superlattice and structural study. The fifth chapter studies charge transfer at the interface between Bi2Se3 layer and ZnxCd1-xSe layer. We start by looking at the result of charge transport study of our superlattice. Then we will present the result of our density functional theory (DFT) calculation, which showed completely different charge transfer between Bi2Se3 sits on top of ZnxCd1-xSe and ZnxCd1-xSe on top of Bi2Se3. This will provide a perfect explanation of our experimental results. Then we designed experiment using transport measurement to test and confirm out explanation. The sixth chapter gives a short summary of this thesis work and a proposal for future work

OpTree: An Efficient Algorithm for All-gather Operation in Optical Interconnect Systems

All-gather collective communication is one of the most important communication primitives in parallel and distributed computation, which plays an essential role in many HPC applications such as distributed Deep Learning (DL) with model and hybrid parallelism. To solve the communication bottleneck of All-gather, optical interconnection network can provide unprecedented high bandwidth and reliability for data transfer among the distributed nodes. However, most traditional All-gather algorithms are designed for electrical interconnection, which cannot fit well for optical interconnect systems, resulting in poor performance. This paper proposes an efficient scheme, called OpTree, for All-gather operation on optical interconnect systems. OpTree derives an optimal $m$-ary tree corresponding to the optimal number of communication stages, achieving minimum communication time. We further analyze and compare the communication steps of OpTree with existing All-gather algorithms. Theoretical results exhibit that OpTree requires much less number of communication steps than existing All-gather algorithms on optical interconnect systems. Simulation results show that OpTree can reduce communication time by 72.21%, 94.30%, and 88.58%, respectively, compared with three existing All-gather schemes, WRHT, Ring, and NE.Comment: This paper is under review at a conferenc

Strong Revenue (Non-)Monotonicity of Single-parameter Auctions

Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the inaccurate prior since the true value distribution is larger? This so-called strong revenue monotonicity is known to be true for single-parameter auctions when the feasible allocations form a matroid. We find that strong revenue monotonicity fails to generalize beyond the matroid setting, and further show that auctions in the matroid setting are the only downward-closed auctions that satisfy strong revenue monotonicity. On the flip side, we recover an approximate version of strong revenue monotonicity that holds for all single-parameter auctions, even without downward-closedness. As applications, we get sample complexity upper bounds for single-parameter auctions under matroid constraints, downward-closed constraints, and general constraints. They improve the state-of-the-art upper bounds and are tight up to logarithmic factors

Immunogenic sonodynamic therapy for inducing immunogenic cell death and activating antitumor immunity

Immunotherapy is widely regarded as a promising treatment for cancer. However, the immune effector phase suppression of tumor microenvironment (TME) and the generation of immune-related adverse events limit its application. Research indicates that sonodynamic therapy (SDT) can effectively activate antitumor immunity while killing tumor cells. SDT produces cytotoxic substances of tumors, and then cell apoptosis and immunogenic death occur by selectively activating the sonosensitizer under ultrasound. In recent years, various SDT alone as well as SDT in combination with other therapies have been developed to induce immunogenic cell death (ICD) and enhance immunotherapy. This paper overviews the research progress of SDT and nanotechnology in recent years, including the strategies involving SDT alone, SDT-based synergistic induction of antitumor immunity, and immunotherapy based on SDT for multimodal immunotherapy. Finally, the prospects and challenges of these SDT-based therapies in cancer immunotherapy are discussed