Drafts

Research and drug development regarding CAR T-cell therapies has been rapidly progressing and expanding over the past few years. In order to attack the ‘antigen loss’ problem, researchers are looking into potential other antigen targets that can be used in combination with CD19 CAR T-cells as a form of treatment ‘cocktail’. Researchers have also been looking into application of CAR T-cell therapy  for patients with blood cancers and solid tumors.  Therapies regarding solid tumors have proven difficult due to the microenvironment of the tumor that makes immune response extremely difficult.

CAR T-cell therapy and immunotherapy in general has shown great promise. Continued funding and research can lead to fine-tuning of drug therapies as well as targets for different kinds of cancers. Immunotherapy at this point should not be looked at as a ‘silver bullet’ to cure cancer, however it can be another tool that oncologists can use to improve standard of living and remission length.

Traditional treatment of cancer has always been based on invasive surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. However, with advances and molecular biology and biochemical engineering, immunotherapies, or therapies that use the patients own immune system to attack tumors has been gaining traction and shown a lot of promise. This generally works by the extracting a patients T cells through a process called leukapheresis and then genetically modifying those T cells to express a chimeric antigen receptor through the use of retrovirals and then injecting the modified T cells back into the body to bind tumor antigens. The modified T-cells are only injected into the patients body after their immune system is completely depleted. The most common antigen target of drugs furthest along in development is an antigen found on B cells called CD19.

I took Resource Economics Statistics 212 in the Spring of 2016 with Professor Wayne. The class was structured as a TBL and most of the work was done in groups. The class taught basic statistical principles as well as how to use Microsoft excel to apply those principles and was focused in social science and business-related fields. The key concepts taught were probability theory, hypothesis testing and normal distribution analysis. This including chi square analysis and when to accept or reject a null hypothesis as well as t and z tables. I was able to apply some of those concepts in my Genetics class this past fall. The excel portion of the course was useful in actually constructing relevant tables and figures using large amounts of data. Overall, what I took away from the course was that statistics can often be misleading when not analyzed and applied properly. 

Those who argue in support of this view, state that the development of a fertilized egg into to baby is a continuous process and that any attempt to pinpoint when and where personhood begins is unnecessary. Once the sperm and egg meet the an embryo must be protected. Catholic, Orthodox, and conservative Protestants are strong supporters of this view. Those who argue against this claim that an embryo that has not been implanted into the uterus does not have the psychological, emotional or physical properties associated with being a person, it is an organic material with a status no different from other body parts.

In one of the ads, the demographic being targeted is wealthy people. The approach to this demographic is using a gold bar in their advertising depicting its high quality and value. They also use words such as premium on the box, to claim its high prestige brand when being compared to other companies. For the cigarette ads that are targeting women, they depict models and beautiful women who are smoking and enjoying the sensation from it.

These ads are all targeting the emotion of being relaxed and cool. These emotions are certainly marketable because people who are feeling stressed can resort to smoking to relieve the situation. To depict the aspect of being cool, the cigarette ads show people smoking while sitting in a hot tub at a party or while riding a motorcycle. The aspect of being cool can be appealing to young teenagers, as social status plays a major role in children. These ads also target the emotion of pleasure, in which everyone in a sense seeks some sense of pleasure.

https://goo.gl/images/siQGpz

Since Chapter 5 was on data presenting, I thought it would be interesting to share this image. This is a great and appealing visual display of their  data. I don't think there could have been a better way to display it!

This is a link to how intrinsic our hand is. There are so many nerves in our hands, with different sizes of receptive fields and cortical representations. Here is an interpretation of the figure: 

     EX: motion sensitive neuron responds to stroking the skin in all directions

     EX: direction sensitive neuron responds strongly to motions towards the ulnar side of the palm but fails to respond to motion along the same               path in the opposite direction

     EX: an orientation sensitive neuron responds better to motion across a finger (ulnar-radial) than to motion along the finger (distal-proximal)                 but doesn’t distinguish from radial nor proximal from distal directions

We also learned about three basic theories of circulation and came up with physiological justifications for each. The first, the fact that blood flow to each tissue of the body is almost always precisely controlled in relation to the tissue needs, can be explained by either low oxygen for an increase in vasodilating products. These do not have to be mutually exclusive. the second was that cardiac output is controlled mainlly b the sum of all the local tissue flows. We explained that cardiac output is dependent on the volume of blood in the venous system. Third was that arterial pressure is controlled independently of either local blood flwo control or cardiac output control. We explained that heart rate multiplied by stroke volume equals cardiac output and that stroke volume is related to venous return but venous return itself is controlled by total peripheral resistance.

displacement of hair bundle to taller SC inc. # of open channels, producing an increase of inward resting current deploarizing voltage change = receptor potential inc. permeability to (+) dep more NTs released
at high tone bursts, rate decreases b/c fiber is adapted and less likely to respond
How can the auditory nerve signal the large range in level of audible sound from 0-100 dB? (b/c when theres masking fiber can’t signal changes in tone burst)
1.) as the level of tone increases more and more fibers that are tuned to other CF begin to respond, b/c tuning ccurves become broader at higher sound levels
2.) auditory nerve fibers vary in sensitivity to sound and as sound level is incresaed, the less sensitive fibers begin to respond

Phase-Locking: when neurons only fire at a preferred phase of the sound wave at each cycle, usually at peak amplitude
- phase-locking in nerve fibers results from the phasic release of NT as dictated by the ac receptor potential
- @ low frequencies, neurons can fire APs at every cycle, easy to determine frequency of sound b/c it’s the same as the frequency of the neurons APs
- @ higher frequencies (1kHz-4kHz), neurons can’t fire AP w/ every cycle, b/c firing rate is limited by refractory periods
- the only code for sound frequency at high frequencies is the place code
- intensity of stimulus is encoded by the # of fibers that are active other than frequency of firing

The relationship between degree of bundle deflection and receptor potential magnitude is neither linear nor symmetric
I.E. – displacement of bundles in the depolarizing direction produces larger response than equal displacements in the other direction = sigmoidal input and output (not sine)
Thus, symmetrical sinusoidal deflections of the bundle (as might occur with acoustic stimuli) will produce both (ac) and (dc) changes in membrane potential.
dc Component = superimposed depolarizing steady-state
ac Component = sinusoidal
- as you increase F, there is less of this but dc component will remain unperturbed (this is called rectification)
OHC: function to amplify the signal so there is a high sensitivity to hearing
- decrease in resting length by a factor of 4 from the apical to the basal ends, responds by altering its length
- there is a driving force to hyper- and de-polarize the cell depending on K+ and Ca2+ channels
- depends on ratios of ion channels and capacitance of the membrane, there are also big and small hair cells, EX: bigger hair cells respond better to lower F