Department of Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student Seminar Series

Time: Thursday, April 30, 2015 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Jonathan Chen (Rong Fan) and Brendan Huang (Michael Choma)
Room/Office: Amistad Conference Room 112
Location:
Amistad
10 Amistad
New Haven, CT 06511
United States

Department of Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student Seminar Series


Speakers (Advisors): Jonathan Chen (Rong Fan) & Brendan Huang (Michael Choma)
Next up: Thursday, May 14th Linda Fong (Kathryn Miller-Jensen) & Yu Lin (Joerg Bewersdorf)
The titles and abstracts for the two talks are below. Food and drinks will follow the seminar.

Jonathan Chen (Rong Fan)
Title: "Differential response and signaling dynamics of drug sensitive and resistant lung cancer cells to tyrosine kinase inhibition"
Abstract: In the United States, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the leading cause of cancer deaths. NSCLCs are sensitive to tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). However, sustained treatment of EGFR mutant tumors eventually leads to acquired resistance. We use a parental lung carcinoma cell line and two drug resistance derivative lines to study the gain/loss of drug resistance in NSCLC in correlation with the drug response of cell growth, which was measured via ACEA RTCA. We observed that drug resistant cells grow slower than the parental cells but do not show significant inhabitation of growth upon drug treatment. In 1-2 days, the growth of drug resistant cells is further activated by the presence of TKI and surpasses the levels of untreated cells. We further performed the study of signaling in Pi3K-Akt-mTOR and MAPK pathways and identified a constant rebound of MAPK signaling that correlates with the inflection of proliferation behavior. Our results indicate a role for the signaling cascades downstream of tyrosine kinase receptor to dampen the therapeutic benefit of TKI treatment and a persistent response may require a combination treatment targeting on MAPK signaling to suppress the reaction of drug resistant cells.

Brendan Huang (Michael Choma)
Title: "Towards all-optical quantification of ciliary physiology"
Abstract: Cilia are cellular organelles that generate microfluidic flow at multiple sites in the body. They are important for health due to their critical roles in mucus clearance in the respiratory tract, circulation of cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain, and left-right patterning of the body. Nonetheless, standards for basic mechanical phenotyping of cilia are still relatively undefined. As prototypical molecular machines, cilia transduce chemical energy in order to generate a shearing force on fluid. That shearing force and subsequent surface flow is then propagated through the rest of the fluid. Here we present a comprehensive optical imaging-based approach towards quantifying three important physical properties: surface flow, shear stress, and total mechanical energy dissipation. We do so not by measuring the cilia themselves, but by inferring these quantities from the resulting vectorial flow field generated by ciliary action, as measured by optical coherence tomography (OCT). We also propose a simplified model of mechanical ciliary action that naturally gives rise to these parameters. The model additionally allows us to interpret our experimental results in the context of ciliary performance and failure.

Date: Thursday, April 30th, 2015
Time: 4 pm
Location: Amistad Conference Room 112