Engineering Commons^™

Shape Memory Alloy Capsule Micropump For Drug Delivery Applications, Youssef Mohamed Kotb

Theses and Dissertations

Implantable drug delivery devices have many benefits over traditional drug administration techniques and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. By delivering the medication directly to the tissue, they enable the use of larger localized concentrations, enhancing the efficacy of the treatment. Passive-release drug delivery systems, one of the various ways to provide medication, are great inventions. However, they cannot dispense the medication on demand since they are nonprogrammable. Therefore, active actuators are more advantageous in delivery applications. Smart material actuators, however, have greatly increased in popularity for manufacturing wearable and implantable micropumps due to their high energy …

Bcl2 Mediated Targeted Drug Delivery For The Treatment Of Kidney Fibrosis And Stomach Cancer, Humayra Afrin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Apoptosis, the programmed death of cells, is primarily regulated by a delicate balance between pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic signals. The Bcl-2 (B-cell lymphoma 2) family of proteins acts as anti-apoptotic agents, promoting cell survival. Dysregulation of these proteins is a common occurrence in conditions such as cancer and fibrosis, where overexpression of anti-apoptotic members can foster tumor cell survival and fibroblast activation. In this study, our aim was to explore the therapeutic potential of Bcl-2 inhibitors, both as a small molecule (specifically Navitoclax (Navi)), inhibitor and as Bcl-2 siRNA, for targeted treatment. Intravenous administration of Navi often leads to thrombocytopenia, necessitating …

A Machine Learning Framework For Identifying Molecular Biomarkers From Transcriptomic Cancer Data, Md Abdullah Al Mamun

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cancer is a complex molecular process due to abnormal changes in the genome, such as mutation and copy number variation, and epigenetic aberrations such as dysregulations of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA). These abnormal changes are reflected in transcriptome by turning oncogenes on and tumor suppressor genes off, which are considered cancer biomarkers.

However, transcriptomic data is high dimensional, and finding the best subset of genes (features) related to causing cancer is computationally challenging and expensive. Thus, developing a feature selection framework to discover molecular biomarkers for cancer is critical.

Traditional approaches for biomarker discovery calculate the fold change for each …

Evaluation Of The Cytotoxyc Effects Of Lmdf5-7 On A Human T-Cell Leukemia Cell Line, Andrea F. Ibarra Chacon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

According to World Health Organization (WHO), cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide, with 9.6 million deaths in 2018 . In the United States, an estimated 434,982 people were living with cancer during 2017 . Leukemia is the most common blood cancer in children from birth to 14 years old . In particular, Hispanic children in the United States experience a higher incidence rate of leukemia . Therefore, the discovery of novel cancer therapies is necessary to help those affected survive the disease. A new compound, LMDF5-7 was investigated and found to have anticancer properties that can help …

The Resistive Barrier Discharge: A Brief Review Of The Device And Its Biomedical Applications, Mounir Laroussi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper reviews the principles behind the design and operation of the resistive barrier discharge, a low temperature plasma source that operates at atmospheric pressure. One of the advantages of this plasma source is that it can be operated using either DC or AC high voltages. Plasma generated by the resistive barrier discharge has been used to efficiently inactivate pathogenic microorganisms and to destroy cancer cells. These biomedical applications of low temperature plasma are of great interest because in recent times bacteria developed increased resistance to antibiotics and because present cancer therapies often are accompanied by serious side effects. Low …

Novel Applications Of Machine Learning In Bioinformatics, Yi Zhang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Technological advances in next-generation sequencing and biomedical imaging have led to a rapid increase in biomedical data dimension and acquisition rate, which is challenging the conventional data analysis strategies. Modern machine learning techniques promise to leverage large data sets for finding hidden patterns within them, and for making accurate predictions. This dissertation aims to design novel machine learning-based models to transform biomedical big data into valuable biological insights. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on three bioinformatics domains: splice junction classification, gene regulatory network reconstruction, and lesion detection in mammograms.

A critical step in defining gene structures and mRNA …

Emerging Roles Of The Membrane Potential: Action Beyond The Action Potential, Lina Abdul Kadir, Michael Stacey, Richard Barrett-Jolley

Bioelectrics Publications

Whilst the phenomenon of an electrical resting membrane potential (RMP) is a central tenet of biology, it is nearly always discussed as a phenomenon that facilitates the propagation of action potentials in excitable tissue, muscle, and nerve. However, as ion channel research shifts beyond these tissues, it became clear that the RMP is a feature of virtually all cells studied. The RMP is maintained by the cell's compliment of ion channels. Transcriptome sequencing is increasingly revealing that equally rich compliments of ion channels exist in both excitable and non-excitable tissue. In this review, we discuss a range of critical roles …

Technobiology Paradigm In Nanomedicine: Treating Cancer With Magnetoelectric Nanoparticles, Emmanuel Stimphil

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, cancer is the world’s deadliest disease. Despite significant progress to find a cure, especially over the last decade, with immunotherapy rapidly becoming the state of the art, major open questions remain. Each successful therapy is not only limited to a few cancers but also has relatively low specificity to target cancer cells; although cancer cells can indeed be eradicated, many normal cells are sacrificed as collateral damage. To fill this gap, we have developed a class of multiferroic nanostructures known as magnetoelectric nanoparticles (MENs) that can be used to enable externally controlled high-specificity targeted delivery and release of therapeutic …

Perspective: The Physics, Diagnostics, And Applications Of Atmospheric Pressure Low Temperature Plasma Sources Used In Plasma Medicine, M. Laroussi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Low temperature plasmas have been used in various plasma processing applications for several decades. But it is only in the last thirty years or so that sources generating such plasmas at atmospheric pressure in reliable and stable ways have become more prevalent. First, in the late 1980s, the dielectric barrier discharge was used to generate relatively large volume diffuse plasmas at atmospheric pressure. Then, in the early 2000s, plasma jets that can launch cold plasma plumes in ambient air were developed. Extensive experimental and modeling work was carried out on both methods and much of the physics governing such sources …

Plasma Processes And Cancer - Special Topical Cluster Of The 2nd Iwpct Meeting, Masaru Hori, Mounir Laroussi, Kai Masur, Yuzuru Ikehara

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

(First paragraph) Although the emerging multidisciplinary field of plasma medicine has been around for nearly two decades important advances have already taken place that could one day revolutionize healthcare and the way various challenging diseases can be treated.1-3Amongst these advances the effects of low temperature plasma (LTP) on cancer cells in vitro and in vivo stand out.4-13Current cancer treatment modalities, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy, have serious side effects and tend to lose their benefits to the patients after a while. Therefore, novel and improved therapies that can be used alone …

Inkjet Based Personalized Screening Platform For Cancer Therapy, Jorge Ivan Rodriguez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The new paradigm of personalized medicine is beginning to affect clinical practice. In particular, many of the advances in genomics and proteomics have made personalized screening and therapeutic inventions possible. On chip, cellomics approaches to screening and intervention are becoming more commonplace. Cancer therapies may benefit from the rise in `-omics' technologies. In addition, the availability of rapid screening data is crucial to mitigate cancer propagation and increase the possibility of patient recovery. This study is an endeavor to develop a cellomic anticancer drug screening process based on inkjet printing. Previous research has demonstrated that inkjet based screening can reliably …

Prostate Cancer Region Prediction Using Maldi Mass Spectra, Ayyappa Vadlamudi, Shao-Hui Chuang, Xiaoyan Sun, Lisa Cazares, Julius Nyalwidhe, Dean Troyer, O. John Semmes, Jiang Li, Frederic D. Mckenzie

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

For the early detection of prostate cancer, the analysis of the Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in serum is currently the most popular approach. However, previous studies show that 15% of men have prostate cancer even their PSA concentrations are low. MALDI Mass Spectrometry (MS) proves to be a better technology to discover molecular tools for early cancer detection. The molecular tools or peptides are termed as biomarkers. Using MALDI MS data from prostate tissue samples, prostate cancer biomarkers can be identified by searching for molecular or molecular combination that can differentiate cancer tissue regions from normal ones. Cancer tissue regions are …