Publications by authors named "Wan-Jung Chang"

Endotracheal tube dislodgement is a common patient safety incident in clinical settings. Current clinical practices, primarily relying on bedside visual inspections and equipment checks, often fail to detect endotracheal tube displacement or dislodgement promptly. This study involved the development of a deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI)-based system for monitoring tube displacement.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

ChatGPT has sparked extensive discussions within the healthcare community since its November 2022 release. However, potential applications in the field of psychiatry have received limited attention. Deep learning has proven beneficial to psychiatry, and GPT is a powerful deep learning-based language model with immense potential for this field.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Multiple clinical studies have treated mesothelin (MSLN)-positive solid tumors by administering MSLN-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. Although these products are generally safe, efficacy is limited. Therefore, we generated and characterized a potent, fully human anti-MSLN CAR.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CART) immunotherapy shows promise for treating B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), but around two-thirds of patients do not respond effectively.
  • A study found that chromosomal alterations in the BCL-2 gene, which helps cancer cells resist apoptosis, are linked to decreased survival rates in patients treated with anti-CD19 CART.
  • To improve efficacy, researchers created venetoclax-resistant CART cells by modifying BCL-2 and found that this approach, combined with venetoclax, enhanced anti-tumor activity, suggesting new strategies for improving CART therapy in resistant lymphoma cases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In recent years, plant genetic engineering has advanced agriculture in terms of crop improvement, stress and disease resistance, and pharmaceutical biosynthesis. Cells from land plants and algae contain three organelles that harbor DNA: the nucleus, plastid, and mitochondria. Although the most common approach for many plant species is the introduction of foreign DNA into the nucleus (nuclear transformation) via Agrobacterium- or biolistics-mediated delivery of transgenes, plastid transformation offers an alternative means for plant transformation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Plant protoplasts are effective for evaluating CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis efficiency, and the authors enhanced methods for isolating and transfecting these protoplasts from various plant species.
  • They created a technique to isolate and regenerate transformed Nicotiana tabacum protoplasts into mature plants, allowing for the analysis of mutagenesis success.
  • In their study, all four alleles of the phytoene desaturase (NtPDS) gene were mutated in regenerated plants, and most did not contain detectable Cas9 DNA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Inhibitor formation is a serious complication of factor VIII (FVIII) replacement therapy for the X-linked bleeding disorder haemophilia A and occurs in 20%-30% of patients. No prophylactic tolerance protocol currently exists. Although we reported oral tolerance induction using FVIII domains expressed in tobacco chloroplasts, significant challenges in clinical advancement include expression of the full-length CTB-FVIII sequence to cover the entire patient population, regardless of individual CD4 T-cell epitope responses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The chloroplast NAD(P)H dehydrogenase-like (NDH) complex consists of about 30 subunits from both the nuclear and chloroplast genomes and is ubiquitous across most land plants. In some orchids, such as Phalaenopsis equestris, Dendrobium officinale and Dendrobium catenatum, most of the 11 chloroplast genome-encoded ndh genes (cp-ndh) have been lost. Here we investigated whether functional cp-ndh genes have been completely lost in these orchids or whether they have been transferred and retained in the nuclear genome.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chloroplasts play a crucial role in sustaining life on earth. The availability of over 800 sequenced chloroplast genomes from a variety of land plants has enhanced our understanding of chloroplast biology, intracellular gene transfer, conservation, diversity, and the genetic basis by which chloroplast transgenes can be engineered to enhance plant agronomic traits or to produce high-value agricultural or biomedical products. In this review, we discuss the impact of chloroplast genome sequences on understanding the origins of economically important cultivated species and changes that have taken place during domestication.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In recent years, developing pharmaceutical products via multiregional clinical trials (MRCTs) has become standard. Traditionally, an MRCT would assume that a treatment effect is uniform across regions. However, heterogeneity among regions may have impact upon the evaluation of a medicine's effect.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is one of the most prevalent neoplasms worldwide. While numerous potent dietary insults were considered as oncogenic players for HNSCC development, the impact of metabolic imbalance was less emphasized during HNSCC carcinogenesis. Previous preclinical and epidemiological investigations showed that DM could possibly be correlated with greater incidence and poorer prognosis in HNSCC patients; however, the outcomes from different groups are contradictive and underlying mechanisms remains elusive.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Orchids exhibit a range of unique flower shapes and are a valuable ornamental crop. MADS-box transcription factors are key regulatory components in flower initiation and development. Changing the flower shape and flowering time can increase the value of the orchid in the ornamental horticulture industry.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Key innovations have facilitated novel niche utilization, such as the movement of the algal predecessors of land plants into terrestrial habitats where drastic fluctuations in light intensity, ultraviolet radiation and water limitation required a number of adaptations. The NDH (NADH dehydrogenase-like) complex of Viridiplantae plastids participates in adapting the photosynthetic response to environmental stress, suggesting its involvement in the transition to terrestrial habitats. Although relatively rare, the loss or pseudogenization of plastid NDH genes is widely distributed across diverse lineages of photoautotrophic seed plants and mutants/transgenics lacking NDH function demonstrate little difference from wild type under non-stressed conditions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The NAD(P)H dehydrogenase complex is encoded by 11 ndh genes in plant chloroplast (cp) genomes. However, ndh genes are truncated or deleted in some autotrophic Epidendroideae orchid cp genomes. To determine the evolutionary timing of the gene deletions and the genomic locations of the various ndh genes in orchids, the cp genomes of Vanilla planifolia, Paphiopedilum armeniacum, Paphiopedilum niveum, Cypripedium formosanum, Habenaria longidenticulata, Goodyera fumata and Masdevallia picturata were sequenced; these genomes represent Vanilloideae, Cypripedioideae, Orchidoideae and Epidendroideae subfamilies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chemical components of lignocellulosic biomass may impede biofuel processing efficiency. To understand whether the heartwood of Acacia confusa is suitable for biofuel application, extractive-free heartwood of A. confusa was subjected to dilute acid (DA) or sulfite pretreatments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The bamboo Bambusa edulis has a long juvenile phase in situ, but can be induced to flower during in vitro tissue culture, providing a readily available source of material for studies on reproductive biology and flowering. In this report, in vitro-derived reproductive and vegetative materials of B. edulis were harvested and used to generate transcriptome databases by use of two sequencing platforms: Illumina and 454.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In modern times, potent dietary carcinogens are key contributors for neoplastic development. For oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), one of the leading cancer types in developing countries, main oncogenic inducers/enhancers, including areca nut chewing, tobacco smoking, and alcohol consumption, were shown to promote cancer initiation/progression. Over decades, studies from different laboratories have identified underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms for carcinogen-induced OSCC.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Recently, biosimilars have attracted much attention from sponsors and regulatory authorities, while patents on early biological products will soon expire in the next few years. The European Medicines Agency (EMEA) of the European Union (EU) published a guideline on similar biological medicinal products for approval of these products in 2005 . Based on the foundational principles of the EMEA guideline, biosimilars are expected to be similar, not identical, to the innovator biologics they seek to copy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To accelerate the drug development process and shorten approval time, the design of multiregional clinical trials (MRCTs) incorporates subjects from many countries/regions around the world under the same protocol. After showing the overall efficacy of a drug in all global regions, one can also simultaneously evaluate the possibility of applying the overall trial results to all regions and subsequently support drug registration in each of them. In this paper, we focus on a specific region and establish a statistical criterion to assess the consistency between the specific region and overall results in an MRCT.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

One of the challenges of multiregional drug development program is to design and analyze a multiple regional clinical trial with the objective being to satisfy different regional requirements on primary endpoints. Considered in this article is a multiregional clinical trial (MRCT) designed to test for two primary endpoints. Data of a regular fixed-size well-controlled parallel arm trial are used to test for two null hypotheses in terms of two distinct yet correlated endpoints.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The 11th question-and-answer document (Q&A) for ICH E5 (1998) was published in 2006. This Q&A describes points to consider for evaluating the possibility of bridging among regions by a multiregional trial. The primary objective of a multiregional bridging trial is to show the overall efficacy of a drug in all participating regions while also evaluating the possibility of applying the overall trial results to each region.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In recent years, global collaboration has become a conventional strategy for new drug development. To accelerate the development process and shorten approval time, the design of multi-regional clinical trials (MRCTs) incorporates subjects from many countries/regions around the world under the same protocol. After showing the overall efficacy of a drug in a global trial, one can also simultaneously evaluate the possibility of applying the overall trial results to all regions and subsequently support drug registration in each region.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF