Medical and Health Sciences

As of March 9^th, 2021, there have been over 117 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 2.9 million deaths. A group called COVID Moonshot started developing therapeutics for COVID-19 using Fragment Based Drug Discovery, and discovered 74 good fragments to base drugs upon. They then released this information to the public and asked medicinal chemists across the globe to send ... Read More

The project is focused around using and implementing image analysis techniques for analysis of Gel Electrophoresis data specifically in Alzheimer disease mice. To do so, experimentation was done with tools like watershed, graphing of intensity to quantify protein concentration in gel electrophoresis bands. The results indicate that the best quantification of protein concentrations of the gel occur at a specific ... Read More

The Covid-19 pandemic-declared on January 30th, 2020-is still an ongoing and raging problem in the world. With over 117 million cases and over 2 million deaths, the coronavirus pandemic has slowed daily-life. In order to develop therapeutics to SARS-CoV-2, the COVID moonshot project was initiated. In this project, scientists from across the world come together to develop and synthesize compounds ... Read More

Glioblastoma Multiforme(GBM) is the most aggressive and common type of brain cancer in adults. In this study I used a mathematical model to demonstrate the cell proliferation of GBM. The model was found by compiling data from several studies which look at the proliferative index, mitotic Index and percent of cell migration. I ran correlation analysis on the mitotic index ... Read More

For over a year now, the novel virus known as SARS-CoV-2 has been causing infections throughout the world, resulting in many seriously ill patients, and even numerous deaths. A consortium called COVID Moonshot was created in response to the virus, and it aims to crowdsource designed molecules from across the world to test for potential antivirals. Through the use of ... Read More

Ranging from cancerous infections to severe fractures, insults to osseous tissue has the propensity to yield significant debilitative effects in an individual. Current treatments present numerous risks such as donor site morbidity and infection. Thus, bone tissue engineering serves as a promising alternative to combat the shortcomings of allograft and xenograft implementation. Fluffy-PLG is an ultraporous (>95%) polylacde-co-glycolide (PLG) copolymer ... Read More

Nanomedicine has been continuing to develop with many advances in the biomedical field. It aims to provide novel tools for diagnosis and treatments for patients with age-related diseases, such as cancer, atherosclerosis, insulin resistance, and various cardio-metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. Despite recent advances, there is still a lack of effective treatments to prevent age-related diseases. Nanomedicine has the capability to ... Read More

At the beginning of the school year in August 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was still ongoing, resulting in a surge of formulating treatments for the disease. In early 2020, a project called COVID Moonshot was launched in the hopes of scientists sharing their findings and synthesizing compounds to formulate COVID therapeutics. As student researchers, compounds were designed along with other ... Read More

Recent evidence suggests that gut microbiota play a critical role in regulating innate immunity and influencing brain function. Clinical studies revealed an association between brain amyloidosis and the presence of pathogenic bacteria in the gut of cognitively impaired patients. Our previous study concluded that an ABX-perturbed microbiome has selective, sex-specific influences on brain amyloid (Abeta) amyloidosis and microglial homeostasis. The ... Read More

The most commonly prescribed disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) is methotrexate (MTX) because it is one of the most effective treatments for inflammation and it is relatively safe. Because it is taken at a low dose, it must be taken with other DMARDs to control the disease progression. To improve the efficacy of MTX in rheumatoid arthritis, its structure was modified ... Read More

Ovarian cancer has the fifth lowest survival rate by cancer type at 48% after 5 years, however in earlier stages ovarian cancer has a lower mortality rate. This makes the use of biomarkers useful for tracking the progression of ovarian cancer and as a therapeutic target. In this research project two biomarkers were studied, CA-125 and MR-1, to form a ... Read More

In general, estrogen receptor positive breast cancers (ER+ BC) have a high treatability. However, these tumors often recur following endocrine therapy due to breast cancer stem cell (BCSC) activity. BCSC are a group of cells that possess numerous properties, such as self-renewal and the ability to survive independently in the circulation and contribute to breast cancer relapse. Many studies have ... Read More

June’s Learning Laboratory (JLL) has developed a cultural competency curriculum to educate middle school students about the cultures and experiences of those around them and their role in the world. We will conduct research testing the effectiveness of this newly constructed curriculum by comparing the data collected from the surveys given to the participants before and after being taught the ... Read More

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a stage IV astrocytoma, accounting for over 60% of all brain tumors in adults and a very poor prognosis of just 14-15 months. Despite numerous current treatment options, GBM recurs 90% of the time. With barriers in affordability and hesitance toward synthetic medicines, many people have turned to natural treatments for GBM. Last year, we tested ... Read More

Hypertension continues to be a public health crisis in the United States because it carries a significant risk of contributing to cardiovascular diseases which leads to disability, death, and high healthcare expenditure. Nationally, Hypertension control rates are 32% in white adults, 25% in black adults, 19% in Asian adults, and 25% in Hispanic adults.There is a search to approach the ... Read More

June’s Learning Laboratory (JLL) has developed a cultural competency curriculum to educate middle school students about the cultures and experiences of those around them and their role in the world. We will conduct research testing the effectiveness of this newly constructed curriculum by comparing the data collected from the surveys given to the participants before and after being taught the ... Read More

With our rapidly progressively aging society, neurodegenerative diseases including dementia have become one of the leading health challenges in our society. Significant advances have been made in our understanding of neuropathology and clinical manifestations of dementia. A vast amount of data has come from genetic, pathologic and molecular studies of brain samples from dementia patients and control subjects, however the ... Read More

Over the past few decades, one of the largest improvements in cancer therapeutic agents has been the use of mitotic poisons. However, as substantially effective as they are, mitotic poisons’ non-selective involvement in other pivotal physiologic processes entail the necessity of carrying out perturbations to novel components that are explicit to the cell cycle/division pathway. Chromosomal abnormalities, known as aneuploidy, ... Read More

Emtricitabine is a drug used to treat Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection by slowing the progression of the virus in the body. The goal of this study was to start with the structure of the drug emtricitabine and design new compounds to achieve a better binding affinity. By achieving a better binding affinity, the usefulness of the drug in the body ... Read More

The usual drug development timeline has been substantially condensed as the number of global COVID cases rise in order to allow for a safe and effective therapy to be discovered as soon as possible. Moreover, the COVID Moonshot open-sourced initiative has allowed the development of a COVID antiviral to accelerate. After the published fragment screening on the main protease (MPro) ... Read More

Chronic pain is the most prevalent health condition in the United States, affecting over 116 million Americans, and therefore is the focus of many clinical trials. Studies on chronic pain treatment commonly report improvements in pain as a percent reduction from an initial value. Importantly percent reduction implies that improvements in pain are multiplicative. Although percent reductions are conceptually simple, ... Read More

The COVID-19 pandemic has had one of the greatest effects on educational institutions in recent history. With Classes becoming virtual and many activities not being possible because of CDC guidelines and social distancing, it is obvious that this pandemic has greatly changed students’ learning. One type of education has experienced some of the largest changes, Medical Education, as it is ... Read More

June’s Learning Laboratory (JLL) has developed a cultural competency curriculum to educate middle school students about the cultures and experiences of those around them and their role in the world. We will conduct research testing the effectiveness of this newly constructed curriculum by comparing the data collected from the surveys given to the participants before and after being taught the ... Read More

Painful Diabetic Neuropathy (PDN) affects 25% of diabetic patients and is a chronic disorder with a major effect on quality of life and health care costs. It can be characterized by dorsal root ganglion (DRG) nociceptor hyperexcitability, calcium overload, axonal degeneration, and loss of cutaneous intervention. Currently, the molecular mechanisms contributing to neuropathic pain in PDN are still unclear. We ... Read More