Publications by authors named "W-R Huang"

Today, huge amounts of time series data are sensed continuously by AIoT devices, transmitted to edge nodes, and to data centers. It costs a lot of energy to transmit these data, store them, and process them. Data compression technologies are commonly used to reduce the data size and thus save energy.

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Breast cancer is a global concern as a leading cause of death for women. Early and precise diagnosis can be vital in handling the disease efficiently. Breast cancer subtyping based on estrogen receptor (ER) status is crucial for determining prognosis and treatment.

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  • Venetoclax is a novel drug that improves outcomes for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients, showing that early treatment response can predict long-term success.
  • Researchers used mass cytometry to analyze blood samples from CLL patients and found that venetoclax significantly reduced various CLL cell subpopulations while increasing survival proteins in the remaining cells.
  • The study suggests that CLL cells quickly adapt to therapies through survival signals like the B-cell activating factor (BAFF), indicating that combining treatments might lead to more effective and lasting results.
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  • Dual immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) using CTLA4 and PD-(L)1 inhibitors shows improved anti-tumor effectiveness and immune toxicity compared to PD-(L)1 inhibitors alone in advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients.
  • Patients with mutations in STK11 and/or KEAP1 genes benefit more from the combination treatment compared to those receiving only PD-(L)1 inhibitors, as shown in the POSEIDON trial.
  • The loss of KEAP1 serves as a strong predictor for the success of dual ICB, as it leads to a more favorable outcome by changing the tumor's immune environment to better engage CD4 and CD8 T cells for anti-tumor activity. *
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  • Scientists are studying special molecules called bifunctional degraders that can help make drugs more effective by breaking down specific proteins in the body.
  • They created a new way to analyze how these molecules work and discovered that how long these molecules stay attached to the target protein is really important for how well they work.
  • By using clever chemistry techniques, researchers can quickly improve these molecules to help find new drugs faster.
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ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters expressed at the blood-brain barrier (BBB) impede delivery of therapeutic agents to the brain, including agents to treat neurodegenerative diseases and primary and metastatic brain cancers. Two transporters, ABCB1 and ABCG2, are highly expressed at the BBB and are responsible for the efflux of numerous clinically useful chemotherapeutic agents, including irinotecan, paclitaxel, and doxorubicin. Based on a previous mouse model, we have generated transgenic zebrafish in which expression of NanoLuciferase (NanoLuc) is controlled by the promoter of glial fibrillary acidic protein, leading to expression in zebrafish glia.

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Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has witnessed remarkable success in a wide range of control tasks. To overcome RL's notorious sample inefficiency, prior studies have explored data augmentation techniques leveraging collected transition data. However, these methods face challenges in synthesizing transitions adhering to the authentic environment dynamics, especially when the transition is high-dimensional and includes many redundant/irrelevant features to the task.

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Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive and frequently occurring type of malignant brain tumor in adults. The initiation, progression, and recurrence of malignant tumors are known to be driven by a small subpopulation of cells known as tumor-initiating cells or cancer stem cells (CSCs). GBM CSCs play a pivotal role in orchestrating drug resistance and tumor relapse.

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  • A phase 3b clinical trial was conducted to compare the effectiveness and safety of risankizumab and ustekinumab in patients with moderate-to-severe Crohn's disease who didn't respond to anti-TNF therapy.
  • The study evaluated two primary outcomes: clinical remission at week 24 and endoscopic remission at week 48, with risankizumab being tested for noninferiority and superiority, respectively.
  • Results showed that risankizumab was not only noninferior to ustekinumab for clinical remission but also superior for endoscopic remission, with significant improvements reported in patients receiving risankizumab.
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  • The study examines a community-based intervention aimed at reducing opioid-related overdose deaths by increasing the adoption of evidence-based practices including overdose education and naloxone distribution, medication treatment for opioid use disorder, and prescription safety.
  • In a cluster-randomized trial, 67 communities across Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio were assigned to either receive the intervention or serve as a control group during a period marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and an increase in fentanyl overdoses.
  • Results showed no significant difference in opioid-related overdose death rates between the intervention and control groups, with both averaging similar rates, indicating that the community-engaged strategies did not have a measurable impact during the study period.
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A key barrier to the development of vaccines that induce broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other viruses of high antigenic diversity is the design of priming immunogens that induce rare bnAb-precursor B cells. The high neutralization breadth of the HIV bnAb 10E8 makes elicitation of 10E8-class bnAbs desirable; however, the recessed epitope within gp41 makes envelope trimers poor priming immunogens and requires that 10E8-class bnAbs possess a long heavy chain complementarity determining region 3 (HCDR3) with a specific binding motif. We developed germline-targeting epitope scaffolds with affinity for 10E8-class precursors and engineered nanoparticles for multivalent display.

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Objective: To assess the performance of a lower predicted postoperative (ppo) forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV 1 ) or diffusion capacity of the lung for carbon monoxide (DLCO) (ppoFEV 1 /ppoDLCO) threshold to predict cardiopulmonary complications after minimally invasive surgery (MIS) lobectomy.

Background: Although MIS is associated with better postoperative outcomes than open surgery, MIS uses risk-assessment algorithms developed for open surgery. Moreover, several different definitions of cardiopulmonary complications are used for assessment.

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Objective: To evaluate the intrinsic and extrinsic microstructural factors contributing to atrophy within individual thalamic subregions in multiple sclerosis using in vivo high-gradient diffusion MRI.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 41 people with multiple sclerosis and 34 age and sex-matched healthy controls underwent 3T MRI with up to 300 mT/m gradients using a multi-shell diffusion protocol consisting of eight b-values and diffusion time of 19 ms. Each thalamus was parcellated into 25 subregions for volume determination and diffusion metric estimation.

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Targeted therapy is effective in many tumor types including lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer mortality. Paradigm defining examples are targeted therapies directed against non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) subtypes with oncogenic alterations in EGFR, ALK and KRAS. The success of targeted therapy is limited by drug-tolerant persister cells (DTPs) which withstand and adapt to treatment and comprise the residual disease state that is typical during treatment with clinical targeted therapies.

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For cancer clinical trials that require central confirmation of tumor genomic profiling, exhaustion of tissue from standard-of-care testing may prevent enrollment. For Lung-MAP, a master protocol that requires results from a defined centralized clinical trial assay to assign patients to a therapeutic substudy, we developed a process to repurpose existing commercial vendor raw genomic data for eligibility: genomic data reanalysis (GDR). Molecular results for substudy assignment were successfully generated for 369 of the first 374 patients (98.

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  • Current antibody design is inefficient, relying on methods like animal immunization or library screening rather than rational design.
  • A specialized RFdiffusion network has been developed that can create custom antibodies that target specific epitopes effectively.
  • Experimental results show successful binding of the designed antibodies to four relevant disease epitopes, validating the model's accuracy through structural analysis.
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Background: Esophageal cancer is the seventh most frequently diagnosed cancer with a high mortality rate and the sixth leading cause of cancer deaths in the world. Early detection of esophageal cancer is very vital for the patients. Traditionally, contrast computed tomography (CT) was used to detect esophageal carcinomas, but with the development of deep learning (DL) technology, it may now be possible for non-contrast CT to detect esophageal carcinomas.

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Topology optimization can maximally leverage the high DOFs and mechanical potentiality of porous foams but faces challenges in adapting to free-form outer shapes, maintaining full connectivity between adjacent foam cells, and achieving high simulation accuracy. Utilizing the concept of Voronoi tessellation may help overcome the challenges owing to its distinguished properties on highly flexible topology, natural edge connectivity, and easy shape conforming. However, a variational optimization of the so-called Voronoi foams has not yet been fully explored.

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This study proposes a set of generic rules to revise existing neural networks for 3D point cloud processing to rotation-equivariant quaternion neural networks (REQNNs), in order to make feature representations of neural networks to be rotation-equivariant and permutation-invariant. Rotation equivariance of features means that the feature computed on a rotated input point cloud is the same as applying the same rotation transformation to the feature computed on the original input point cloud. We find that the rotation-equivariance of features is naturally satisfied, if a neural network uses quaternion features.

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Despite the introduction of several new agents for the treatment of bladder cancer (BC), intravesical BCG remains a first line agent for the management of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer. In this study we evaluated the antitumor efficacy in animal models of BC of a recombinant BCG known as BCG--OE that releases the small molecule STING agonist c-di-AMP. We found that compared to wild-type BCG (BCG-WT), in both the orthotopic, carcinogen-induced rat MNU model and the heterotopic syngeneic mouse MB-49 model BCG--OE afforded improved antitumor efficacy.

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PD-1 is a co-inhibitory receptor expressed by CD8 T cells which limits their cytotoxicity. PD-L1 expression on cancer cells contributes to immune evasion by cancers, thus, understanding the mechanisms that regulate PD-L1 protein levels in cancers is important. Here we identify tumor-cell-expressed otubain-2 (OTUB2) as a negative regulator of antitumor immunity, acting through the PD-1/PD-L1 axis in various human cancers.

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ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters expressed at the blood-brain barrier (BBB) impede delivery of therapeutic agents to the brain, including agents to treat neurodegenerative diseases and primary and metastatic brain cancers. Two transporters, P-glycoprotein (P-gp, ABCB1) and ABCG2, are highly expressed at the BBB and are responsible for the efflux of numerous clinically useful chemotherapeutic agents, including irinotecan, paclitaxel, and doxorubicin. Based on a previous mouse model, we have generated transgenic zebrafish in which expression of NanoLuciferase (NanoLuc) is controlled by the promoter of glial fibrillary acidic protein, leading to expression in zebrafish glia.

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The Segatella copri (formerly Prevotella copri) complex (ScC) comprises taxa that are key members of the human gut microbiome. It was previously described to contain four distinct phylogenetic clades. Combining targeted isolation with large-scale metagenomic analysis, we defined 13 distinct Segatella copri-related species, expanding the ScC complex beyond four clades.

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  • Mirikizumab, an anti-IL-23 monoclonal antibody, showed effectiveness in treating moderate-to-severe ulcerative colitis in clinical trials, particularly after 12 weeks of treatment.
  • The study analyzed gene expression at week 52 in patients who responded to mirikizumab at week 12, using biopsies to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and maintaining their expression.
  • Results indicated that mirikizumab responders had significantly more transcriptional changes and consistency in gene expression at week 52 compared to placebo responders, suggesting a unique molecular healing pathway related to IL-23 inhibition.
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Repulsive guidance molecule A (RGMa) is an inhibitor of neuronal growth and survival which is upregulated in the damaged central nervous system following acute spinal cord injury (SCI), traumatic brain injury, acute ischemic stroke (AIS), and other neuropathological conditions. Neutralization of RGMa is neuroprotective and promotes neuroplasticity in several preclinical models of neurodegeneration and injury including multiple sclerosis, AIS, and SCI. Given the limitations of current treatments for AIS due to narrow time windows to intervention (TTI), and restrictive patient selection criteria, there is significant unmet need for therapeutic agents that enable tissue survival and repair following acute ischemic damage for a broader population of stroke patients.

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