Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Multi-Omics Integration For Gene Fusion Discovery And Somatic Mutation Haplotyping In Cancer, Steven Mason Foltz

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cancer is a disease caused by changes to the genome and dysregulation of gene expression. Among many types of mutations, including point mutations, small insertions and deletions, large scale structural variants, and copy number changes, gene fusions are another category of genomic and transcriptomic alteration that can lead to cancer and which can serve as therapeutic targets. We studied gene fusion events using data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, including over 9,000 patients from 33 cancer types, finding patterns of gene fusion events and dysregulation of gene expression within and across cancer types. With data from the CoMMpass study (Multiple …

Development Of Novel Tumor-Targeted Compounds For Boron Neutron Capture Therapy, Micah John Luderer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) represents the most common primary brain tumor among adults. Despite surgical resection and aggressive chemoradiotherapy regimens, the current 2- and 5-year survival rates are only 27% and 9.8%, respectively. The low survival stems from the poor response to conventional therapy and underscores the critical need to develop new therapeutic approaches for GBM treatment. The high recurrence rate observed in GBM is in part attributed to the hypoxic (poorly oxygenated) tumor microenvironment. Hypoxic tumor conditions have been shown to increase metastasis, promote angiogenesis, and confer resistance to chemotherapy and radiation.

Hypoxic tissues are inherently radiation resistant due to …

Fluorescence Guided Tumor Imaging: Foundations For Translational Applications, Jessica P. Miller

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Optical imaging for medical applications is a growing field, and it has the potential to improve medical outcomes through its increased sensitivity and specificity, lower cost, and small instrumentation footprint as compared to other imaging modalities. The method holds great promise, ranging from direct clinical use as a diagnostic or therapeutic tool, to pre-clinical applications for increased understanding of pathology. Additionally, optical imaging uses non-ionizing radiation which is safe for patients, so it can be used for repeated imaging procedures to monitor therapy, guide treatment, and provide real-time feedback. The versatile features of fluorescence-based optical imaging make it suited for …

Mri In Cancer: Improving Methodology For Measuring Vascular Properties And Assessing Radiation Treatment Effects In Brain, Chong Duan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tumors cannot survive, progress and metastasize without recruiting new blood vessels. Vascular properties, including perfusion and permeability, provide valuable information for characterizing cancers and assessing therapeutic outcomes. Dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI is a non-invasive imaging technique that affords quantitative parameters describing the underlying vascular structure of tissue. To date, the clinical application of DCE-MRI has been hampered by the lack of standardized and validated quantitative modeling approaches for data analysis.

From a therapeutic perspective, radiation therapy is a central component of the standard treatment for patients with cancer. Besides killing cancer cells, radiation also induces parenchymal and stromal changes in …

Survival Analysis In A Clinical Setting, Yunzhao Liu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the fast paced advancement of modern medicine, cancer treatments have improved greatly over the past few decades; however, the overall survival rate has not improved for head neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Traditionally, the general affected population of HNSCC was male over 50-60 years of age, whom have had history of alcohol and tobacco use. Conversely, in the recent decades, HNSCC has exhibited significant rise in younger patients, largely due to the increase in human papillomavirus (HPV) infection among young adults.

Generally, HPV as the most prevalent sexually transmitted disease, consisted of strains that do not cause harm to …