Publications by authors named "T-T Shen"

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are characterized by unrestrained innate and adaptive immune responses and compromised intestinal epithelial barrier integrity. Regulatory T (T) cells are crucial for maintaining self-tolerance and immune homeostasis in intestinal tissues. Prostaglandin E (PGE), a bioactive lipid compound derived from arachidonic acid, can modulate T cell functions in a receptor subtype-specific manner.

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Sjögren's disease (SjD) is an autoimmune disorder characterized by progressive salivary and lacrimal gland dysfunction, inflammation, and destruction, as well as extraglandular manifestations. SjD is associated with autoreactive B and T cells, but its pathophysiology remains incompletely understood. Abnormalities in regulatory T (T) cells occur in several autoimmune diseases, but their role in SjD is ambiguous.

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Potent agonists of the inducible co-stimulatory receptor 4-1BB are too toxic for patients with advanced cancer. Here, on the basis of observations of a weak agonist of 4-1BB depleting regulatory T (T) cells within the tumour microenvironment without leading to substantial restoration of dysfunctional cytotoxic T cells (CTLs), we show that effective tumour control can be achieved via concurrent T cell depletion and CTL expansion through an anti-4-1BB antibody fused to interleukin-15 (IL-15) via a peptide sensitive to tumour proteases. In mouse models of advanced cancers, intraperitoneal injection of the bifunctional protein attenuated the activity of the interleukin mostly in the periphery of the primary tumour while allowing for the expansion of CTLs within the tumour microenvironment, led to more effective tumour inhibition and to lower systemic toxicity than treating the cancers with combinatorial treatment with unlinked anti-4-1BB antibody and IL-15, and reduced the resistance of tumours to checkpoint blockade.

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  • - We developed a new 2 µm nanosecond solid-state laser using a unique heterojunction saturable absorber, achieving stable pulses at a low pump power of 12.69 W.
  • - The laser emits pulses with a width of 818 ns and a maximum energy of 15.48 µJ, showing better performance compared to previous technologies.
  • - This innovative laser technology has potential applications in fields like atmospheric monitoring and lidar, offering significant advancements in mid-infrared pulsed laser systems.
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  • The study developed an intranasal COVID-19 vaccine called RBD-HR, which consists of a receptor binding domain-derived protein and a special oil-in-water adjuvant for enhanced immune response.
  • Testing in mice and rats showed that the vaccine generated strong and long-lasting immune responses, producing high levels of neutralizing antibodies against specific SARS-CoV-2 variants for at least six months.
  • Additionally, the intranasal administration of the vaccine resulted in effective mucosal and systemic immunity, and when used as a booster after mRNA vaccines, it provided better immune responses and protection against live virus challenges.
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  • * Diagnosis may involve imaging techniques like MRI and advanced transvaginal ultrasound, which help identify deep endometriosis and assess associated complications like fibrosis and adhesions.
  • * Radiologists play a crucial role in recognizing the wide range of endometriosis manifestations, including the ability to evaluate features that might indicate malignancy.
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This systematic review aims to synthesize scientific evidence on the effects of oral nutritional supplementation (ONS) on health-related outcomes and nutritional biomarkers among children and adolescents with undernutrition. The review protocol was reported following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines. A comprehensive keyword and reference search was conducted in seven electronic bibliographic databases: PubMed, Academic Search Complete, Academic Search Premier, CINAHL, Global Health, Web of Science, and Scopus.

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Ovarian aging results in reproductive disorders and infertility in mammals. Previous studies have reported that the ferroptosis and autophagy caused by oxidative stress may lead to ovarian aging, but the mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we compared the morphological characteristics between the aged and young ovaries of pigs and found that the aged ovaries were larger in size and showed more corpora lutea.

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  • Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (γδ T-ALL) is a rare and complex condition in children, prompting a study of 200 pediatric cases to identify its clinical and genetic characteristics.
  • The research revealed that very young children (under 3 years) with γδ T-ALL face a significantly high risk and display specific genetic changes, particularly involving STAG2 inactivation and LMO2 activation.
  • Importantly, their findings suggest that targeting DNA repair pathways linked to STAG2 inactivation with specific drugs could offer new treatment options and help classify patients based on their risk levels.
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Chemoselective hydrogenation of carbonyl in unsaturated aldehydes is a significant process in the chemical industry, in which the development of aqueous-phase reaction systems as a substitution to organic ones is challenging. Herein, we report Ir atomic cluster catalysts anchored onto WO nanorods a reduction treatment at various temperatures (denoted as Ir/WO-T, = 200, 300, 400, and 500 °C), which accelerates the chemoselective hydrogenation of carbonyl groups in aqueous solutions. The optimal catalyst Ir/WO-300 exhibits exceptional activity (TOF value: 1313.

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Regulatory T (T) cells are critical for immune tolerance but also form a barrier to antitumor immunity. As therapeutic strategies involving T cell depletion are limited by concurrent autoimmune disorders, identification of intratumoral T cell-specific regulatory mechanisms is needed for selective targeting. Epigenetic modulators can be targeted with small compounds, but intratumoral T cell-specific epigenetic regulators have been unexplored.

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Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) causes huge economic losses to agriculture every year; thus, understanding the mechanism of plant resistance to CMV is imperative. In this study, an integrated analysis of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observations and proteomic results was used to identify cytoarchitectural differences in Nicotiana tabacum cv. NC82 (susceptible) and cv.

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  • The study evaluates the BNT162b2 vaccine's effectiveness in preventing COVID-19 infection and severe illness in children and adolescents, focusing on the Delta and Omicron variants.
  • It involved analyzing data from over 77,000 adolescents during the Delta phase and 167,000 children and adolescents during the Omicron phase, comparing vaccinated individuals to those unvaccinated.
  • Results showed the vaccine was extremely effective (98.4%) during the Delta period, while the effectiveness during the Omicron period dropped to around 74.3%, with no significant impact on cardiac complications among vaccinated individuals.
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  • - In a study of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, researchers examined the immune responses of individuals with similar disease severity to determine signs of potential clinical decline.
  • - They utilized advanced techniques like single-cell RNA sequencing and chromatin accessibility assays on blood cells from patients at admission, comparing those who improved with those who deteriorated.
  • - The findings revealed significant changes in immune cell gene expression and chromatin structure, indicating that early immune dysregulation could serve as predictive biomarkers for severe progression of COVID-19.
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Background And Objectives: We characterize clinical and neuroimaging features of SARS-CoV-2-related acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE).

Methods: Systematic review of English language publications in PubMed and reference lists between January 1, 2020, and June 30, 2023, in accordance with PRISMA guidelines. Patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection who fulfilled diagnostic criteria for sporadic and genetic ANE were included.

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Regulatory T (T) cells play an essential role in maintaining immune balance across various physiological and pathological conditions. However, the mechanisms underlying T homeostasis remain incompletely understood. Here, we report that RIPK1 is crucial for T cell survival and homeostasis.

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Embryogenesis necessitates harmonious coordination between embryonic and extraembryonic tissues. Although stem cells of both embryonic and extraembryonic origins have been generated, they are grown in different culture conditions. In this study, utilizing a unified culture condition that activates the FGF, TGF-β, and WNT pathways, we have successfully derived embryonic stem cells (FTW-ESCs), extraembryonic endoderm stem cells (FTW-XENs), and trophoblast stem cells (FTW-TSCs) from the three foundational tissues of mouse and cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) blastocysts.

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Context/objectives: The scarce research on factors associated with surrogate decisional regret overlooks longitudinal, heterogenous decisional-regret experiences and fractionally examines factors from the three decision-process framework stages: decision antecedents, decision-making process, and decision outcomes. This study aimed to fill these knowledge gaps by focusing on factors modifiable by high-quality end-of-life (EOL) care.

Methods: This observational study used a prior cohort of 377 family surrogates of terminal-cancer patients to examine factors associated with their membership in the four preidentified distinct decisional-regret trajectories: resilient, delayed-recovery, late-emerging, and increasing-prolonged trajectories from EOL-care decision making through the first two bereavement years by multinomial logistic regression modeling using the resilient trajectory as reference.

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Purpose: Gamma delta T-cell receptor-positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia (γδ T-ALL) is a high-risk but poorly characterized disease.

Methods: We studied clinical features of 200 pediatric γδ T-ALL, and compared the prognosis of 93 cases to 1,067 protocol-matched non-γδ T-ALL. Genomic features were defined by transcriptome and genome sequencing.

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Integrating adaptive learning rate and momentum techniques into stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to a large class of efficiently accelerated adaptive stochastic algorithms, such as AdaGrad, RMSProp, Adam, AccAdaGrad, and so on. In spite of their effectiveness in practice, there is still a large gap in their theories of convergences, especially in the difficult nonconvex stochastic setting. To fill this gap, we propose weighted AdaGrad with unified momentum and dubbed AdaUSM, which has the main characteristics that: 1) it incorporates a unified momentum scheme that covers both the heavy ball (HB) momentum and the Nesterov accelerated gradient (NAG) momentum and 2) it adopts a novel weighted adaptive learning rate that can unify the learning rates of AdaGrad, AccAdaGrad, Adam, and RMSProp.

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Many hematologic malignancies are not curable with chemotherapy and require novel therapeutic approaches. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is 1 such approach that involves the transfer of T cells engineered to express CARs for a specific cell-surface antigen. CD38 is a validated tumor antigen in multiple myeloma (MM) and T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) and is also overexpressed in acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

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Background: Transverse tubules (t-tubules) form gradually in the developing heart, critically enabling maturation of cardiomyocyte Ca homeostasis. The membrane bending and scaffolding protein BIN1 (bridging integrator 1) has been implicated in this process. However, it is unclear which of the various reported BIN1 isoforms are involved, and whether BIN1 function is regulated by its putative binding partners MTM1 (myotubularin), a phosphoinositide 3'-phosphatase, and DNM2 (dynamin-2), a GTPase believed to mediate membrane fission.

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Purpose: The purpose of this study was to demonstrate accurate measurement of corneal elastic moduli in vivo with noncontact and noninvasive optical coherence elastography.

Methods: Elastic properties (in-plane Young's modulus, E, and both in-plane, μ, and out-of-plane, G, shear moduli) of rabbit cornea were quantified in vivo using noncontact dynamic acoustic micro-tapping optical coherence elastography (AµT-OCE). The intraocular pressure (IOP)-dependence of measured mechanical properties was explored in extracted whole globes following in vivo measurement.

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Context: Regret plays a central role in surrogate decision making. Research on decisional regret in family surrogates is scarce and lacks longitudinal studies to illustrate the heterogenous, dynamic evolution of decisional regret.

Objectives: To identify distinct decisional-regret trajectories from end-of-life (EOL) decision making through the first two bereavement years among surrogates of cancer patients.

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Background: Increasing SERCA2 (sarco[endo]-plasmic reticulum Ca ATPase 2) activity is suggested to be beneficial in chronic heart failure, but no selective SERCA2-activating drugs are available. PDE3A (phosphodiesterase 3A) is proposed to be present in the SERCA2 interactome and limit SERCA2 activity. Disruption of PDE3A from SERCA2 might thus be a strategy to develop SERCA2 activators.

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