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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (63 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC San Francisco Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2023)

Introduction: Anterior open bite (AOB) is a type of malocclusion that exhibit no anterior guidance resulting in a lack of occlusal equilibrium in static and dynamic aspects, which could induce more stress for the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) than a normal occlusion. However, the effect of orthodontic treatment to obtain anterior guidance for patients with AOB on TMJ condyle remained poorly studied. This study aims to analyze the condylar changes in AOB patients by comparing their CBCT data pre- and post-orthodontic treatment.

Methods: The 108 AOB patients underwent orthodontic treatment included had cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans taken before orthodontic (T1) and after orthodontic treatment (T2). We divided them into 3 different severity groups (Mild, Moderate, and Severe) and 3 different treatment modalities groups (ALN, FFA, and Sx). Measurements were conducted using InVivo 6 for the condylar joint space, depth of fossa, condylar position, and condylar dimension. Pre-treatment and post-treatment three-dimensional (3D) volume of bilateral condylar head were calculated, and the representative 3D models were superimposed using voxel-based registration on the mandibular stable region.

Results: After orthodontic treatment for AOB, the condyles tend to seat more posteriorly and superiorly for about 0.17-0.21mm and 0.09-0.12mm respectively; the depth of fossa increased 0.22mm on the right side; the asymmetry of the condylar position improved; the condylar width increased for 0.44mm; the condylar height increased for 0.40mm; and the 3D condylar volume increased for 98.29 mm3. Teenage AOB patients have significant condylar changes (joint space, laterolateral condylar position, height, width, and 3D volume) after treatment while adult patients generally do not experience many changes except for the surgical patients. As patient ages, the dimensional and volumetric changes after treatment decreased. Surgical patients experienced the most volumetric increase after treatment of AOB. There is no difference in the amount of condylar changes between AOB treatment with ALN and FFA.

Conclusions: Our results shows that orthodontic treatment for AOB overall does not predispose patients to the risk of condylar resorption or dysfunction. The joint space changes are small, however, the direction of these changes in teenage patients may warrant closer examination and consideration in treatment planning. As AOB patients age, the amount of condylar changes decrease with no much significant changes in adult non-surgical patients. Surgical AOB patients may experience more condylar positive remodeling after treatment compared to the non-surgical patients.

    Cover page: Condylar changes in anterior open bite patients after orthodontic treatment -- a CBCT evaluation
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC San Francisco Previously Published Works (2016)

    Introduction

    Cancer immunotherapy has made much progress in recent years. Clinical trials evaluating a variety of immunotherapeutic approaches are underway in patients with malignant gliomas. Thanks to recent advancements in cell engineering technologies, infusion of ex vivo prepared immune cells have emerged as promising strategies of cancer immunotherapy.

    Areas covered

    Herein, the authors review recent and current studies using cellular immunotherapies for malignant gliomas. Specifically, they cover the following areas: a) cellular vaccine approaches using tumor cell-based or dendritic cell (DC)-based vaccines, and b) adoptive cell transfer (ACT) approaches, including lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) cells, γδ T cells, tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL), chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cells and T-cell receptor (TCR) transduced T cells.

    Expert opinion

    While some of the recent studies have shown promising results, the ultimate success of cellular immunotherapy in brain tumor patients would require improvements in the following areas: 1) feasibility in producing cellular therapeutics; 2) identification and characterization of targetable antigens given the paucity and heterogeneity of tumor specific antigens; 3) the development of strategies to promote effector T-cell trafficking; 4) overcoming local and systemic immune suppression, and 5) proper interpretation of imaging data for brain tumor patients receiving immunotherapy.
      • Article
      Contemporary Music Score Collection (2024)
      This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library.
        Cover page: Ambivalence
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 39 (2017)
        Children and adults are guided by verb-specific syntactic like-lihoods, or verb bias, in language comprehension and produc-tion. Recent reports showed that verb bias can be altered bynew linguistic experience. We investigated the mechanismsunderlying this verb bias learning or adaptation. Specifically,we asked whether verb bias learning, like abstract syntacticpriming, is driven by error-based implicit learning. We reportthree experiments in which we altered the biases of familiardative verbs in children’s and adults’ sentence production, viatraining trials that induced participants to produce each verbconsistently in either double-object or prepositional-object da-tive structures. Participants’ syntactic choices in later test trialsreflected the expected adaptation of verb bias to the trainingexperience. In addition, the magnitude of the training effectvaried with the likelihood of each sentence structure and withpre-existing verb bias: Unexpected verb-structure combina-tions resulted in larger training effects, suggesting the opera-tion of error-based implicit learning.
          Cover page: Error-Based Learning: A Mechanism for Linking Verbs to Syntax
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 45 (2023)
          Young children’s intuitions about the meanings of novel nouns have revealed foundational biases in language learning. Nevertheless, existing work on such word-learning biases has focused primarily on only one spatial domain to which nouns might refer—objects—not the large-scale and navigable places in which objects are situated. Previous research has nevertheless shown that adults and children treat objects and places differently not only in recognition and navigation tasks, but also in symbolic tasks, like drawing production. In a noun-extension task, we thus evaluate young children’s and adults’ word-learning biases across these two spatial domains—objects and places—and show that young children and adults treat objects and places differently in language: Young children and adults preferentially extend novel nouns to objects over places. This bias suggests a specific role for spatial domain in word learning and may reflect greater attention to objects over places in symbolic contexts like language.
            Cover page: Young Children and Adults Extend Novel Nouns to Objects not Places
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UCLA Previously Published Works (2014)
            Transcription factors Mitf and NFATc1 share many downstream targets that are critical for osteoclastogenesis. Since RANKL signals induce/activate both NFATc1 and Mitf isoform-E (Mitf-E), a tissue-restricted Mitf isoform in osteoclasts, it is plausible that the two factors work together to promote osteoclastogenesis. Although Mitf was shown to function upstream of NFATc1 previously, this study showed that expression of Mitf had little effects on NFATc1 and NFATc1 was critical for the induction of Mitf-E. In Mitf(mi/mi) mice, the semi-dominant mutation in Mitf gene leads to arrest of osteoclastogenesis in the early stages. However, when stimulated by RANKL, the Mitf(mi/mi) preosteoclasts responded with a significant induction of NFATc1, despite that the cells cannot differentiate into functional osteoclasts. In the absence of RANKL stimulation, very high levels of NFATc1 are required to drive osteoclast development. Our data indicate that Mitf functions downstream of NFATc1 in the RANKL pathway, and it plays an important role in amplifying NFATc1-dependent osteoclastogenic signals, which contributes to the significant synergy between the two factors during osteoclastogenesis. We propose that Mitf-E functions as a tissue-specific modulator for events downstream of NFATc1 activation during osteoclastogenesis.
              Cover page: Mitf regulates osteoclastogenesis by modulating NFATc1 activity
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UCLA Previously Published Works (2023)

              Background

              Cancer's hallmark feature is its ability to evolve, leading to metastasis and recurrence. Although genetic mutations and epigenetic changes have been implicated, they don't fully explain the leukocytic traits that many cancers develop. Cell fusion between cancer and somatic cells, particularly macrophages, has been suggested as an alternative pathway for cancer cells to obtain new traits by acquiring exogenous genetic material.

              Methods

              This study aims to investigate the potential biological outcomes of tumor-myeloid cell fusion by generating tumor-macrophage hybrid cells. Two clones with markedly different tumorigenicity were selected, and RNA-seq was used to compare their RNA expressions with that of the control cells. Based on the results that the hybrid cells showed differential activation in several upstream regulator pathways that impact their biological behaviors, the hybrid cells' abilities to recruit stromal cells and establish angiogenesis as well as their cell cycle distributions were investigated through in vitro and in vivo studies.

              Results

              Although both hybrid clones demonstrated p53 activation and reduced growth rates, they exhibited distinct cell cycle distributions and ability to grow in vivo. Notably, while one clone was highly tumorigenic, the other showed little tumorigenicity. Despite these differences, both hybrid clones were potent environmental modifiers, exhibiting significant abilities to recruit stromal and immune cells and establish angiogenesis.

              Conclusions

              The study revealed that tumor-somatic cell fusion is a potent environmental modifier that can modulate tumor survival and evolution, despite its relatively low occurrence. These findings suggest that tumor-somatic cell fusion could be a promising target for developing new cancer therapies. Furthermore, this study provides an experimental animal platform to investigate cancer-myeloid fusion and highlights the potential role of tumor-somatic cell fusion in modulating the tumor environment.
                Cover page: The impact and outcomes of cancer-macrophage fusion
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 45 (2023)
                Recent work in computer vision and cognitive reasoning has given rise to an increasing adoption of the Violation-of-Expectation (VoE) paradigm in synthetic datasets. Inspired by infant psychology, researchers are now evaluating a model’s ability to label scenes as either expected or surprising with knowledge of only expected scenes. However, existing VoE-based 3D datasets in physical reasoning provide mainly vision data with little to no heuristics or inductive biases. Cognitive models of physical reasoning reveal infants create high-level abstract representations of objects and interactions. Capitalizing on this knowledge, we established a benchmark to study physical reasoning by curating a novel large-scale synthetic 3D VoE dataset armed with ground-truth heuristic labels of causally relevant features and rules. To validate our dataset in five event categories of physical reasoning, we benchmarked and analyzed human performance. We also proposed the Object File Physical Reasoning Network (OFPR-Net) which exploits the dataset's novel heuristics to outperform our baseline and ablation models. The OFPR-Net is also flexible in learning an alternate physical reality, showcasing its ability to learn universal causal relationships in physical reasoning to create systems with better interpretability.
                  Cover page: A Benchmark for Modeling Violation-of-Expectation in Physical Reasoning Across Event Categories
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UCLA Previously Published Works (2021)
                  Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a ubiquitous human pathogen that can be cleared by host immunity. Nonetheless, a small percentage of the patients develop persistent infection with oncogenic HPV, which poses an increased risk of developing HPV-associated malignancy. Although cell-mediated immunity is a known systemic factor, local factors that influence persistent HPV infection have not been fully investigated. HPV-related head/neck cancers have a strong site preference for the oropharynx, suggesting the existence of unique local factors that promote HPV-induced oncogenesis. The human oropharynx often harbors anaerobic bacteria that produce a variety of byproducts, including butyrate. Because butyrate is a potent epigenetic modulator, it could be an environmental factor influencing the development of HPV-positive oropharyngeal malignancy. In this study, we showed that butyrate treatment changed the property of HPV16 E6/E7-immortalized keratinocytes. In vitro, the treatment increased the cells' migration ability, slowed the growth, and increased the genotoxic resistance. When implanted in the syngeneic mice, the treated keratinocytes survived longer and exhibited a different growth pattern. The survival advantage obtained after butyrate exposure may increase the susceptibility of HPV-infected oropharyngeal keratinocytes to further malignant transformation. These results suggest that fermentation products of tonsillar bacteria may play an important role in the long-term persistence of high-risk HPV infection, which is a critical risk factor for developing HPV-positive oropharyngeal malignancy.
                    Cover page: Exposure to Microbial Metabolite Butyrate Prolongs the Survival Time and Changes the Growth Pattern of Human Papillomavirus 16 E6/E7-Immortalized Keratinocytes in Vivo
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UCLA Previously Published Works (2010)
                    Microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (Mitf) is a transcription factor that plays an important role in regulating the development of several cell lineages. The subcellular localization of Mitf is dynamic and is associated with its transcription activity. In this study, we examined factors that affect its subcellular localization in cells derived from the monocytic lineage since Mitf is present abundantly in these cells. We identified a domain encoded by Mitf exon 1B1b to be important for Mitf to commute between the cytoplasm and the nucleus. Deletion of this domain disrupts the shuttling of Mitf to the cytoplasm and results in its retention in the nucleus. M-CSF and RANKL both induce nuclear translocation of Mitf. We showed that Mitf nuclear transport is greatly influenced by ratio of M-CSF/Mitf protein expression. In addition, cell attachment to a solid surface also is needed for the nuclear transport of Mitf.
                      Cover page: Subcellular localization of Mitf in monocytic cells
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