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Expanding the Reach of Electrocorticographic Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Bimanual Approach
Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies have traditionally been designed under the assumption that BCI users are patients who no longer exhibit any significant motor control abilities, due in part to deficits resulting from neuromuscular disease. Of particular interest is the activity that occurs in motor related areas ...
Development and Optimization of Peptide-Based, Tumor-Associated Macrophage (TAM)-Targeting Therapeutics
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death and is a subject of intense research worldwide. Within the past few decades, cancer immunotherapy has emerged as an important arm of cancer therapies following the prominent success of immune checkpoint blockade therapies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapies. While ...
Development of activatable recognition proteins using the bacterial adhesin FimH
Recognition molecules, such as antibodies, are widely useful in many applications within bioengineering, or life sciences in general. However, the high cost and variability in antibodies has led to the development of alternative protein scaffolds. While many such alternatives have high binding affinity, a range of specificities, ...
Improvement of Vibration and End-to-End Latency for Optical Motion Detection System in Magnetic Resonance Imaging
This dissertation presents improvements to both software and hardware for a marker-less optical motion detection system used in magnetic resonance imaging. Multiple devices have been developed to eliminate artifacts in MRI caused by patient movement, as motion is a common cause of artifact. Most developed devices require ...
Glycan polymeric prodrugs against pulmonary intracellular alveolar infections
Intracellular pathogens are a major cause of global morbidity and mortality due to their complex and intricate ability to replicate within host cells while evading the innate immune defense system. Many intracellular pathogens, such as F. tularensis and B. pseudomallei, are highly infectious and can cause severe and fatal ...
Controlling apoptosis with computationally designed inhibitors targeting pro-survival and pro-apoptosis BCL2 family members
BCL2 family proteins regulate apoptosis and thus play a critical role in tissue homeostasis and development in healthy cells. A number of pathologies exploit the BCL2 family to promote artificially prolonged life or premature death. The doctoral research presented here has employed computational protein design and in vitro ...
High-Throughput Characterization of Protein-Protein Interactions by Reprogramming Yeast Mating
High-throughput methods for screening protein-protein interactions enable the rapid characterization of engineered binding proteins and interaction networks. While existing approaches are powerful, none allow quantitative library-on-library characterization of protein interactions in a modifiable extracellular environment. ...
Comparing the release rates of ciprofloxacin from different polymer structures with different linker chemistries
Polymeric prodrugs of ciprofloxacin for inhalation are attractive alternatives to orally-administered free ciprofloxacin and inhalable liposomal formulations. This study investigated the release kinetics of ciprofloxacin from four different polymers synthesized from two types of monomeric ciprofloxacin prodrug, HBC containing ...
Combinatorial maturation strategy for disease modeling and phenotypic drug screening of Duchenne muscular dystrophy cardiomyopathy
Human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) offer great promise for regenerative medicine, preclinical drug screening, and cardiac disease modeling applications. One of the most significant hurdles towards adoption of hPSC-CM technologies, however, is cardiomyocyte developmental immaturity. Current differentiation ...
Development of biomaterial porous scaffolds for dendritic cell modulation and mRNA delivery
mRNA has emerged as a potential candidate for vaccine applications in recent years as a versatile, safe, and cost-effective alternative to traditional therapeutics. Efficient delivery to antigen presenting cells and protection against rapid in vivo degradation are the two greatest challenges for mRNA vaccine development. ...