UCLA researchers in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering have developed a machine learning platform to virtually screen combinatorial drug therapies.

CRISPR-Cas9 technology has revolutionized the field of biological research through the introduction of sequence-specific genomic manipulation at the DNA level. It has also been reported that catalytically-dead Cas9 (dCas9) can successfully be localized to specific mRNAs within live cells. However, no system exists to perform Cas9-mediated sequence editing at the RNA level.

 An increasing body of research has shown that alternations in RNA splicing are involved in a number of human diseases, particularly cancer. Drug regulation of splicing has become an interesting new target for therapeutic discovery. A number of drug discovery efforts aimed at developing splicing-modulating small-molecules are being tested in clinic trials for cancer.

UCLA researchers have developed a novel method for computational sensing using low-cost and mobile plasmonic readers designed by machine learning.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a highly flexible and reconfigurable optical imaging and spectroscopy platform.

UCLA researchers in the Departments of Medicine, Radiology and Bioengineering have developed novel methods for monitoring cardiac autonomic function in vascular and tissue compartments by measuring neurotransmitters and metabolites in vivo.

Gene therapy applications necessitate cell transfection techniques for delivering biomaterial into multiple or a single cell(s). The global market for transfection technologies can be worth more than half a billion by 2017. Current viral and chemical transfection techniques have limited ease of fabrication, transfection efficiency, dosage control, and cell viability. The invention discloses a simple yet efficient technique for nanoinjection of material into a single cell with high transfection efficiency, controlled dosage delivery, and full cell viability.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed small molecule inhibitors of androgen receptor variants for the treatment of androgen inhibitor-resistant cancers.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Physiology have developed a method of genetically silencing calcium signaling in cells and organisms for use in studying aberrant calcium signaling in disease.

Medical devices are susceptible to contamination by harmful microbes, such as bacteria and fungi, which form biofilms on device surfaces. These biofilms are often resistant to antibiotics and other current treatments, resulting in over 2 million people per year suffering from diseases related to these contaminating microbes. Death rates for many of these diseases are high, often exceeding 50%. Researchers at UCI have developed a novel anti-bacterial and anti-fungal biocomposite that incorporates a nanopillared surface structure that can be applied as a coating to medical devices.

96 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The CRISPR-Cas system is now understood to confer bacteria and archaea with acquired immunity against phage and viruses. CRISPR-Cas systems consist of Cas proteins, which are involved in acquisition, targeting and cleavage of foreign DNA or RNA, and a CRISPR array, which includes direct repeats flanking short spacer sequences that guide Cas proteins to their targets. The programmable nature of these systems has facilitated their use as a versatile technology that is revolutionizing the field of genome manipulation. There is a need in the art for additional CRISPR-Cas systems with improved cleavage and manipulation under a variety of conditions and ones that are particularly thermostable under those conditions.     UC researchers discovered a new type of RNA-guided endonuclease (GeoCas9) and variants of GeoCas9.  GeoCas9 was found to be stable and enzymatically active in a temperature range of from 15°C to 75°C and has extended lifetime in human plasma.  With evidence that GeoCas9 maintains cleavage activity at mesophilic temperatures, the ability of GeoCas9 to edit mammalian genomes was then assessed.  The researchers found that when comparing the editing efficiency for both GeoCas9 and SpyCas9, similar editing efficiencies by both proteins were observed, demonstrating that GeoCas9 is an effective alternative to SpyCas9 for genome editing in mammalian cells.  Similar to CRISPR-Cas9, GeoCas9 enzymes are expected to have a wide variety of applications in genome editing and nucleic acid manipulation.   

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed an approach to rapidly screen and identify antigenic components in tissues and organs.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have discovered a class of compounds that both bind to a unique newly-discovered binding site in respiratory complex III and act as inhibitors of electron transport for use as mitochondrial anti-cancer drugs.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have developed a novel method of parahydrogen-induced polarization in water using heterogeneous catalysts.

The absolute configuration of an organic compound dictates its interactions with other chemicals. The Competing Enantioselective Conversion (CEC) method is an attractive method for determining the absolute configuration of secondary alcohols, but the preparation of stock reagent solutions takes longer than the analysis time itself – a mere 1-2 hours. The inventors at UCI have developed a CEC kit which contains stock solutions of the components required for CEC that remain stable and usable for several months.

A microfluidic device that separates single cells from whole tissue in a rapid and gentle manner using hydrodynamic fluid flow. The separated single cell suspensions can then be used in tissue engineering applications, regenerative medicine and the study of cancer.

UCLA researchers have created a method that achieves uniform normal-incident illumination of a spherical surface by first projecting the sphere onto a Cartesian plane and then raster scanning it using an illuminating beam. This allows the scanned object, the illumination source, and the detector to remain stationary.

UCLA researchers in the UCLA Semel Institutes of Neuroscience and Behavior have developed a non-invasive method to locate and estimate electrical currents in organs such as the brain and heart.

UCLA researchers have developed a compressive sampling algorithm for on-chip fluorescent imaging over an ultra-large field-of-view without the need for any lenses or mechanical scanning.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a rapid, low-cost, and label-free methodology for nanoparticle sizing.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical Engineering have developed a light-weight and cost-effective fluorescence microscope installed on a cell phone.

UCLA researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have developed a small molecule library consisting of a large variety stereochemical variants.

UCLA researchers have identified a strategy to manipulate the gut microbiome to mimic the effects of a ketogenic diet, as a treatment for CNS disorders and metabolic diseases.

There is significant interest in developing methods that visualize and detect RNA in live cells. Bioorthogonal template driven tetrazine ligations are quickly becoming a powerful route to visualizing nucleic acids in native cells, yet past work has been limited with respect to the diversity of fluorogens and existing tetrazine-reactive fluorogenic probes are quenched by through‐bond energy transfer (TBET) or Fӧrster resonance energy transfer (FRET) between the donor fluorophore and acceptor tetrazine.

Researchers from the Chemistry and Biochemistry department at UCLA have developed method of separating and/or sorting specific target structures from other non-target structures in a complex mixture using custom-made target-specific colloidal particles.