Immune System Diseases Commons^™

Adipocytes And Innate Immunity In Systemic Sclerosis, Nancy Wareing

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Systemic sclerosis (SSc; scleroderma) is a chronic systemic autoimmune and connective tissue disorder characterized by vasculopathy, autoimmune phenomena, and widespread fibrosis. Skin thickening and tightening is the cardinal feature of SSc and is responsible, in part, for the considerable morbidity of this disease. There are currently no targeted treatments for skin manifestations in SSc, primarily due to our fragmented understanding of its pathophysiologic mechanisms. In PART I, we report a previously unappreciated link between aberrant expression of the developmental gene sine oculis homeobox homolog 1 (SIX1) in skin-associated adipocytes in SSc skin and the early loss of dermal white adipose …

Vitamin C Contributes To Epigenetic Regulation Of Genes Related To Diabetic Retinopathy In Retinal Endothelial Cells, Elizabeth L. Turner, Jonathon Reynolds, Walker Kay, Marianne Becnel, Matthew Conway, Alexander Kim, John A. Kriak, Kyle B. Bills, David W. Sant

Annual Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Characterizing The Function Of B Cells That Accumulate In The Inflamed Central Nervous System In Anti-Myelin Autoimmunity, Lika Chowdhury

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While the role of autoimmune T cells has been extensively studied in anti-myelin

autoimmunity, little is known about the function of B cells in multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (CNS). B cells form clusters with T cells in the meninges directly adjacent to demyelinating lesions. Previous studies have shown that disease progression is dependent on the depletion of specific populations of B cells, but it is not clear which contributes to pathology or how. The purpose of this thesis is to characterize the population of meningeal B cells to determine how they differ …

An Application Of The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem: Optimizing Cluster Method Parameters To Produce Predictive Data For Hiv Outbreaks, Connor J. Chato, Art Fy Poon

Western Research Forum

Background

A popular approach to study HIV outbreaks is to cluster cases based on genetic similarity. However, there is no widely-used statistical criterion which optimizes the parameters for sequence-based clustering methods. The relationship between a cluster-defining similarity threshold and it’s associated set of clusters can be analogized to the aggregation level in the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP).

Hypothesis

Based on the selection of aggregation level for study partitions in MAUP, we present a statistical framework to optimize the similarity threshold for pairwise distance algorithm TN93 (http://github.com/veg/tn93). We hypothesize that defining this threshold includes case connections such that …

Immune Checkpoint Inhibition And The Prevalence Of Autoimmune Disorders Among Patients With Lung And Renal Cancer, Sherif M. El-Refai

Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty Publications

PURPOSE: Immune checkpoint inhibition reactivates the immune response against cancer cells in multiple tissue types and has been shown to induce durable responses. However, for patients with autoimmune disorders, their conditions can worsen with this reactivation. We sought to identify, among patients with lung and renal cancer, how many harbor a comorbid autoimmune condition and may be at risk of worsening their condition while on immune checkpoint inhibitors such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab.

METHODS: An administrative health care claims database, Truven MarketScan, was used to identify patients diagnosed with lung and renal cancer from 2010 to 2013. We assessed patients …

Hivtoolbox, An Integrated Web Application For Investigating Hiv, David P. Sargeant, Sandeep Deverasetty, Yang Luo, Angel Villahoz Baleta, Stephanie Zobrist, Viraj Rathnayake, Jacqueline C. Russo, Jay Vyas, Mark A. Muesing, Martin Schiller

Life Sciences Faculty Research

Many bioinformatic databases and applications focus on a limited domain of knowledge federating links to information in other databases. This segregated data structure likely limits our ability to investigate and understand complex biological systems. To facilitate research, therefore, we have built HIVToolbox, which integrates much of the knowledge about HIV proteins and allows virologists and structural biologists to access sequence, structure, and functional relationships in an intuitive web application. HIV-1 integrase protein was used as a case study to show the utility of this application. We show how data integration facilitates identification of new questions and hypotheses much more rapid …