UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    LIGHT ACTIVATABLE PURE PORPHYRIN NANOPARTICLES FOR THE PHOTODYNAMIC OPENING OF THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER AND GLIOBLASTOMA TREATMENT
    (2022) Inglut, Collin Thomas; Huang, Huang Chiao; Bioengineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Glioblastoma (GBM) consistently recurs due to infiltrating cancer cells that cannot be removed by surgery and chemotherapy. The diffusive nature of GBM makes complete surgical resection unsafe, and the intact blood-brain barrier (BBB) prevents the penetration and accumulation of nearly all chemotherapy in infiltrative GBM cells. Existing BBB opening strategies are often associated with increased risk of edema, hemorrhage, or neurotoxicity and thus have limited clinical success. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a photochemistry-based treatment modality that has shown promise in treating GBM and opening the BBB in the clinic. In fact, a single adjunctive dose of PDT has been shown to add as much as 18 months to patient survival. However, the full potential of PDT is limited by the light activation depth of the ‘gold standard’ pro-drug photosensitizer, 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA). In addition, large doses of PDT can result in edema and neurotoxicity. To address these issues, our lab has developed a photodynamic priming (PDP) strategy using the verteporfin (VP) photosensitizer, which operates at low optical energy to enhance intratumoral drug accumulation without damaging the healthy brain tissues. Unfortunately, VP is hydrophobic and requires liposomal encapsulation for intravenous administration, which can alter the photosensitizers cellular pharmaceutics. Here, we develop and compare a novel carrier-free pure-photosensitizer nanoparticle to a clinically relevant liposomal formulation.This dissertation covers a complementary, four-pronged approach to enhance drug delivery to brain tumors and treat GBM: (1) Understand the photoactivation depth of clinically relevant photosensitizers in the rodent brain for the targeting of infiltrative GBM cells. (2) Explore the mechanisms of photochemistry-induced BBB opening. (3) Engineer light-activable nanotechnology that can open the BBB, improve drug delivery, and eradicate GBM cells. And (4) develop a high-throughput model to examine the BBB integrity and efflux transporter function. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is the delivery of photoactivatable pure-photosensitizer nanoparticles can eradicate GBM cells and enhance drug delivery to microscopic GBM tumors.
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    USING STATISTICAL METHOD TO REVEAL BIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF HUMAN DISEASE: STUDY OF GLIOBLASTOMA BY USING COMPARATIVE GENOMIC HYBRIDIZATION (CGH) METHOD
    (2010) Wang, Yonghong; Smith, Paul; Mathematical Statistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Glioblastoma is a WHO grade IV tumor with high mortality rate. In order to identify the underlying biological causation of this disease, a comparative genomic hybridization dataset generated from 170 patients' tumor samples was analyzed. Of many available segmentation algorithms, I focused mainly on two most acceptable methods: Homogeneous Hidden Markov Models (HHMM) and Circular Binary Segmentation (CBS). Simulations show that CBS tends to give better segmentation result with low false discovery rate. HHMM failed to identify many obvious breakpoints that CBS identified. On the other hand, HHMM succeeds in identifying many single probe aberrations. Applying other statistical algorithms revealed distinct biological fingerprints of Glioblastoma disease, which includes many signature genes and biological pathways. Survival analysis also reveals that several segments actually correlate to the extended survival time of some patients. In summary, this work shows the importance of statistical model or algorithms in the modern genomic research.