The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the importance of high-quality data for empirical health research and evidence-based political decision-making. To leverage the full potential of these data, a better understanding of the determinants and conditions under which people are willing to share their health data is critical. Building on the privacy theory of contextual integrity, the privacy calculus, and previous findings regarding different data types and recipients, we argue that established social norms shape the acceptance of novel practices of data collection and use. To investigate the willingness to share health data, we conducted a preregistered vignette experiment. The scenarios experimentally varied the vignette dimensions by data type, recipient, and research purpose. While some findings contradict our hypotheses, the results indicate that all three dimensions affected respondents’ data sharing decisions. Additional analyses suggest that institutional and social trust, privacy concerns, technical affinity, altruism, age, and device ownership influence the willingness to share health data.

Microscopy has evolved through centuries of desire to see the unseen world. Modern technologies have pushed the limits of what's possible, inspiring the field of structural biology. Coupled with advances in biochemistry, scientists can now study the fine details of tiny intruders in the body as well as the molecular culprits of disease. Despite these monumental achievements, human health still suffers from persistent dysfunctions in biological molecules. Through cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) imaging technology we can create more translatable models to uncover the atomic details of macromolecules gone awry. For instance, the tumor suppressor p53 is one of the most popular proteins in cancer research, yet there is little structural information about its complete 3D organization. The Center for Structural Oncology (CSO) at Penn State University is working to address these impactful uncertainties. Using a wealth of cryo-EM resources in the CSO, we capture dynamic snapshots of p53 assemblies while preserving their disease-related context for drug discovery and therapeutic development. With these tools in hand, the CSO is working to engineer new molecular paradigms in creating a world without cancer.

This work is focused on determining whether two graphene derivatives: graphene oxide (GO) and reduced graphene oxide (RGO) can be used alone as a component of anticancer therapy. In this paper, we present the synthesis GO and RGO, their physicochemical characterization as well as an evaluation of their cytotoxic properties on cancer (HepG2 and MCF-7) and non-malignant (clone-9 and HMF) cells. We demonstrated that both tested graphene derivatives have a high affinity to cancer cells. We showed that cytotoxic properties of GO and RGO were different depending on the type of solvent in which they were prepared. Additionally, we observed that cytotoxic properties of GO and RGO were different depending on the origin of the cells (liver and breast) and the form of graphene material (GO and RGO). We showed that GO and RGO can be potential, selectively materials which in future can found application in anticancer therapy.

Y2O3 and Gd2O3 upconversion nanoparticles (UCN) co-doped with Yb3+ and Er3+ can absorb and upconvert near infrared (NIR) radiation into visible light. These UCN find application in bioimaging, as an important tool to diagnose and visualize cancer cells. The UCN can be used as biolabels to identify the cells; the nanoparticles can be coated and functionalized with ligands that bind to receptors on the surface of the cell. In this project, the UCN were synthesized by sol-gel method and subsequently coated with a thin silica shell by using the Stöber method. The core-shell UCN were functionalized with amine group to enable folic acid conjugation. The functionalized core-shell nanoparticles were analyzed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and luminescence measurements. Concentrations of bare and coated/functionalized UCN between 0.001 µg/mL and 1 µg/mL were tested on two different cell lines from human cervix carcinoma (HeLa) and human colorectal adenocarcinoma (DLD-)1 with colorimetric assay based on the MTT reagent (methy-134 thiazolyltetrazolium). The results show good luminescence spectra on all core-shell UCN. The MTT assays show that some concentrations of bare UCN of Y2O3: Er, Yb (1%, 1% mol) and Gd2O3 were cytotoxic for cervical adenocarcinoma cells (HeLa). For human colorectal adenocarcinoma all UCN are non-cytotoxic. The UCN with silica-aminosilane functionalization (APTS/TEOS) were non-cytotoxic on both cell lines.

Farnesyltransferase (FT) inhibitors can suppress tumor cell proliferation without substantially interfering with normal cell growth, thus holding promise for cancer treatment. A structure-based approach to the design of improved FT inhibitors relies on knowledge of the conformational flexibility of the zinc-containing active site of FT. Although several X-ray structures of FT have been reported, detailed information regarding the active site conformational flexibility of the enzyme is still not available. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of FT can offer the requisite information, but have not been applied due to a lack of effective methods for simulating the four-ligand coordination of zinc in proteins. Here, we report in detail the problems that occurred in the conventional MD simulations of the zinc-bound FT and a solution to these problems by employing a simple method that uses cationic dummy atoms to impose orientational requirement for zinc ligands. A successful 1.0 ns (1.0 fs time step) MD simulation of zinc-bound FT suggests that nine conserved residues (Asn127α, Gln162α, Asn165α, Gln195α, His248β, Lys294β, Leu295β, Lys353β, and Ser357β) in the active site of mammalian FT are relatively mobile. Some of these residues might be involved in the ligand-induced active site conformational rearrangement upon binding and deserve attention in screening and design of improved FT inhibitors for cancer chemotherapy.