Medical and Health Sciences

The rise of diabetes mellitus, particularly among younger people, has been a cause of public health concern recently. Many scientific studies conducted throughout the pandemic showed diabetes as being a cause for severe complications related to COVID. Current treatment for diabetes primarily consists of lifestyle changes and/or medications. Natural remedies for diabetes have been gaining more traction lately, given the ... Read More

Articular cartilage is a vital connective tissue in the musculoskeletal system. Because articular cartilage is avascular in nature, effective repair of cartilaginous defects remains a challenge. Dimension Inx (Chicago, IL), recently developed a novel ultraporous scaffold: Fluffy polylactide co-glycolide (FPLG). It is capable of being 3D printed to precisely adhere to irregular contours present in cartilaginous surfaces. This study evaluated ... Read More

With no current vaccine for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), it is crucial to study what factors influence how HIV infects host cells to develop new strategies and therapies to combat this pandemic. Cleavage and polyadenylation specificity factor 6 (CPSF6) is an HIV host factor known to influence HIV infectivity and trafficking early in the infection. We hypothesize that the overexpression ... Read More

The development of effective antiviral drugs for COVID-19 is ongoing. COVID Moonshot is an initiative that contributes to this goal. We aim to develop easily manufacturable antiviral drugs that can inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, Mpro. Using fragment-based drug discovery, which identifies low-molecular-weight ligands that bind to biologically important macromolecules, leads for the biological target were identified. We designed new ... Read More

Tiopronin is a prescription thiol drug used as medication to treat severe homozygous cystinuria. Although not an immediate threat it contains the risk of the formation of kidney stones. Tiopronin is used as a second-line therapy to control the rate of cysteine precipitation and excretion. The price of tiopronin has recently exploded from $1.50 to $30 per pill, a 1,900% ... Read More

Fungal mycetoma is a neglected tropical disease that destroys skin, subcutaneous, and bone tissues in the limbs, causing deformity and physical disability. The disease spreads after contamination of wounds, typically on the feet or legs of a patient. There are over 70 identified fungal species that can cause fungal mycetoma after infecting humans. The disease is most prevalent in arid, ... Read More

After brain injury, increased levels of monoamines in the central nervous system may result in hypertonia, or increased muscle tone on the affected side. The purpose of this project is to determine how low levels of cutaneous electrical stimulation affect hypertonia in patients with chronic hemiparetic stroke.

Electromyography (EMG) data was collected from the biceps, lateral triceps, and brachioradialis muscles ... Read More

The prevalence of antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases has been on the rise, staging a major threat to the key role antibiotics play a key role in disease management. This global public health problem has reignited many discussions of finding new antibiotic resistance genes, revealing antimicrobial impacts and potential of soil bacteria in fighting these pathogens. Antibiotic residues in soil vary depending ... Read More

There is no drug on the market that successfully “cures” HIV, which leaves millions of people in an endless cycle of symptom suppressing drugs. The goal of this research project was to design and synthesize a better and more efficient medication starting from an already existing drug on the market: atazanavir. Using a program called SeeSAR to modify the structure ... Read More

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and the second leading cause of death in the United States, and the primary cause of mortality is metastasis to other organs. The perinucleolar compartment (PNC) is a sub-nucleolar structure that has been associated with metastasis and the progression of cancer, resulting in poor patient outcomes. To combat metastatic cancer, look towards ... Read More

Histone modifications are essential in regulating chromatin function and structure. Abnormal histone methylation is often detected during tumor development and progression. NSD1, NSD2, and NSD3 are key histone methyltransferases (HMTs) that catalyze lysine 36 dimethylation (K36me2) at histone H3. Inactivating NSD1 mutations are frequent in head neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) commonly occur in HPV-negative oropharyngeal (OP) carcinoma and laryngeal ... Read More

Natural Remedies for Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) Glioblastoma multiforme, commonly known as GBM, is a form of the brain with uncontrollable cell growth. For the past few decades, there have been many attempts to find a working or reliable cure to reduce the effects of this tumor, but nothing has been successful. As a result, many of those affected turn to ... Read More

For several years, 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 programs such ... Read More

Herpes Simplex Virus Type 2 (HSV-2) is one of the most widespread sexually transmitted infections in the world today, infecting more than 500 million people worldwide. In a recent article, we showed that OPTN, a gene that codes for the Optineurin protein, selectively marks essential HSV proteins for degradation in an autophagy-dependent manner and that an essential chemokine, CCL5, positively ... Read More

Cisplatin is a platinum-based chemotherapy drug used to treat various types of cancers, including sarcomas, some carcinomas (i.e. small cell lung cancer, and ovarian cancer), lymphomas and germ cell tumors (DrugBank, 2021). Cisplatin can cause hearing loss in the cochlea, which is a result of some of the cancer therapies that happen in hospitals. In this study three experimental groups ... Read More

Cystinuria is a medical condition in which stones that are composed of an amino acid called Cysteine are found strictly in the bladder, kidney, and ureter. Said condition is controlled through a medication documented as tiopronin; however after Thiola, the most common anaccessible brand, raised prices by 2900%, it became virtually impossible to afford. This study works through the synthesis ... Read More

Body posture involves multiple aspects of the body with standing, sitting, and walking being major factors contributing to an individual’s posture. Bent or slouched posture often leads to various negative health issues such as back pain, joint degeneration, and spinal dysfunction. Within the medical field, surgeons often spend hours in awkward positions while operating which leads to long-term poor spinal ... Read More

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the usual drug development timeline has been substantially condensed. This shortened timeline aims to facilitate the discovery of a safe and effective therapy as soon as possible, as the number of global COVID cases rise. Moreover, the COVID Moonshot open-sourced initiative facilitates the accelerated development of a COVID antiviral. After the published fragment screening on the ... Read More

Pharmacogenomics is being increasingly used to guide certain clinical prescription decisions and will feed into future precision medicine applications. However, current pharmacogenetics (PGx) studies (and thus, the clinical guidelines coming out of PGx studies) are done predominantly using subjects of European descent and thus not representative of the human population. CYP function can be very different between ethnicities, and thus ... Read More

The initial site for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection is the upper respiratory system. In many patients, however, the virus finds a way to reach the lungs, which can result in serious infection. Coronavirus can also spread to various parts of the body causing multiorgan failure. Although over 80% of patients with severe COVID-19 demonstrate neurological symptoms, ... Read More

Dramatically expanding our ability for clinical genetic testing for inherited conditions and complex diseases such as cancer, next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies are allowing for rapid interrogation of thousands of genes and identification of millions of variants. Variant annotation, the process of assigning functional information to DNA variants based on the standardized Human Genome Variation Society (HGVS) nomenclature, is a ... Read More

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a type of chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), where deregulated immune responses promote exacerbated inflammation and formation of ulcers in the large intestine. IBD is also one of the high-risk factors for the development of colorectal cancer (CRC). Robust neutrophil infiltration is an important feature of both UC and CRC and in both cases, disease severity ... Read More

In the mouse brain, there are 59 retinorecipient regions, including the medial amygdala (MeA). The MeA is a sensory integrating region where social information is processed, especially those related to sexual selection, aggression, and pup retrieval. The neurons that link visual input to the brain are known as retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). There are ~47 mouse RGC subtypes, each with ... Read More