Grad students help undergrads get most out of UCLA
Three days before classes started, a small group of international undergrads wheeling suitcases appeared at the walk-up window of the College Academic Counseling office in Murphy Hall.
The mentoring program, funded by the Division of Undergraduate Education, is especially needed this year as UCLA welcomes its largest freshman class ever. The CAMs, who earn tuition remission and work alongside full-time counselors, offer a unique perspective since they were in the undergrads’ shoes so recently.
Many students come in feeling stuck because they’ve planned to become doctors or lawyers, but decide in college that it’s not right for them, Gordon said. “Sometimes there’s a lot of pressure from home to be a doctor,” but partly because students and their families don’t know enough about other promising career paths, he said. “We’re able to show them all the options to decide for themselves, and give them the information to advocate at home for a different direction.”
Life scientists use novel technique to produce genetic map for African AmericansLife scientists use novel technique to produce genetic map for African Americans
Chemistry never sounded this good!
‘I’m a tumor and I’m over here!’ Nanovaults used to prod immune system to fight cancer
UCLA scientists have discovered a way to “wake up” the immune system to fight cancer by delivering an immune system–stimulating protein in a nanoscale container called a vault directly into lung cancer tumors. The new method harnesses the body’s natural defenses to fight disease growth.
The vaults, barrel-shaped nanoscale capsules found in the cytoplasm of all mammalian cells, were engineered to slowly release a protein — the chemokine CCL21 — into tumors. Pre-clinical studies in mice with lung cancer showed that the protein stimulated the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells, potently inhibiting cancer growth, according to the study’s co-senior author Leonard Rome, a researcher at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.
“Researchers have been working for many years to develop effective immune therapies to treat cancer, with limited success,” said Rome, who has been studying vaults for decades. “In lung tumors, the immune system is down-regulated, and what we wanted to do was wake it up, find a way to have the cancer say to the immune system, ‘Hey, I’m a tumor and I’m over here. Come get me.’ ”
The study appears in the May 3 issue of PLoS One, a peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science.
Waking up the immune system
The new vault delivery system, which Rome characterized as “just a dream” three years ago, is based on a 10-year, ongoing research effort focused on using a patient’s white blood cells to create dendritic cells, which are immune system cells that process antigen material and present it on their surface to other immune cells known as T cells, stimulating a response.
As part of that effort, Dr. Steven Dubinett, director of the Jonsson Cancer Center’s lung cancer program, led a Phase I study in which these dendritic cells were infected with a replication-deficient adenovirus engineered to carry a gene that prompts them to over-secrete CCL21. The engineered cells were then injected, 10 million at a time, directly into patients’ lung cancer tumors to stimulate an immune response — the first time the chemokine has been administered to humans.
The early-phase study has shown the dendritic cell method is safe, has no side effects and seems to boost the immune response; Dubinett and his team found T lymphocytes circulating in the blood stream with specific cytokine signatures, indicating that the lymphocytes were recognizing the cancer as a foreign invader.
However, the process of generating dendritic cells from white blood cells and engineering them to over-secrete CCL21 is cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming. It also requires a Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) suite, a specialized laboratory that is critical for the safe growth and manipulation of cells, which many research institutions do not have.
“It gets complicated,” said Dubinett, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, a member of the CNSI and a co-senior author of the current paper. “You have to have a confluence of things happen: The patient has to be clinically eligible for the study and healthy enough to participate, and we have to be able to grow the cells and then genetically modify them and give them back.”
There also was the challenge of patient-to-patient variability, said co-senior author Sherven Sharma, a professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine and a researcher at the Jonsson Cancer Center and CNSI. It was easier to isolate and grow the dendritic cells in some patients than in others, so results were not consistent.
“We wanted to create a simpler way to develop an environment that would stimulate the immune system,” Sharma said.
How nanovaults could be more effective, less expensive
In the Phase I study, it takes more than a week to differentiate the white blood cells into dendritic cells and let them grow into the millions required for the therapy. The dendritic cells are infected with the adenovirus and then injected into the patient’s tumor using guided imaging.
“We thought if we could replace the dendritic cells with a nanovehicle to deliver the CCL21, we would have an easier and less expensive treatment that also could be used at institutions that don’t have GMP,” Dubinett said.
If successful, the vault delivery method would add a desperately needed weapon to the arsenal in the fight against lung cancer, which accounts for nearly one-third of all cancer deaths in the United States and kills 1 million people worldwide every year.
“It’s crucial that we find new and more effective therapies to fight this deadly disease,” Dubinett said. “Right now we don’t have adequate options for therapies for advanced lung cancer.”
The vault nanoparticles containing the CCL21 have been engineered to slowly release the protein into the tumor over time, producing an enduring immune response. Although the vaults protect the packed CCL21, they act like a time-release capsule, Rome said.
Rome, Dubinett and Sharma plan to test the vault delivery method in human studies within the next three years and hope the promising results they have found in pre-clinical animal tumor models will be replicated. If such a study is approved, it would be the first time a vault nanoparticle is used in humans for a cancer immunotherapy.
The vault nanoparticle would require only a single injection into the tumor because of the slow-release design, and it eventually could be designed to be patient-specific by adding the individual’s tumor antigens into the vault, Dubinett said.
The vaults may also be targeted by adding antibodies to their surface that recognize receptors on the tumor. The injection could then be delivered into the blood stream and the vault would navigate to the tumor, a less invasive process that would be easier on the patients. The vault could also seek out and target tumors and metastases too small to be detected with imaging.
Rome cautioned that the vault work is at a much earlier stage than Dubinett’s dendritic cell research, but he is encouraged by the early results. The goal is to develop an “off-the-shelf” therapy using vaults.
“In animals, the vault nanoparticles have proven to be as effective, if not more effective, than the dendritic cell approach,” he said. “Now we need to get the vault therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in humans.”
Because a vault is a naturally occurring particle, it causes no harm to the body and is potentially an ideal vehicle for use in the delivery of personalized therapies, Rome said.
The study was funded by a University of California Discovery Grant; a Jonsson Cancer Center fellowship grant; the National Institutes of Health; the UCLA Lung Cancer Program; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Research Funds; and the University of California’s Tobacco-related Disease Program Award.
UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has more than 240 researchers and clinicians engaged in disease research, prevention, detection, control, treatment and education. One of the nation’s largest comprehensive cancer centers, the Jonsson Center is dedicated to promoting research and translating basic science into leading-edge clinical studies. In July 2010, the center was named among the top 10 cancer centers nationwide by U.S. News & World Report, a ranking it has held for 10 of the last 11 years.
The California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA is an integrated research facility located at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. Its mission is to foster interdisciplinary collaborations in nanoscience and nanotechnology; to train a new generation of scientists, educators and technology leaders; to generate partnerships with industry; and to contribute to the economic development and the social well-being of California, the United States and the world. The CNSI was established in 2000 with $100 million from the state of California. An additional $850 million of support has come from federal research grants and industry funding. CNSI members are drawn from UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the School of Dentistry, the School of Public Health and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. They are engaged in measuring, modifying and manipulating atoms and molecules — the building blocks of our world. Their work is carried out in an integrated laboratory environment. This dynamic research setting has enhanced understanding of phenomena at the nanoscale and promises to produce important discoveries in health, energy, the environment and information technology.
UCLA News|Week: Radioactive Fallout and Lab Safety
USD Model United Nations aims for success
The students of Model United Nations are gearing up for a challenging set of spring conferences at UC Riverside and UCLA, culminating in New York at the 2011 National Model United Nations.
The UC Riverside conference will be held March 4 to 6, and will give students an opportunity to practice their critical thinking, public speaking and negotiating skills. “Riverside is more like a teaching and learning conference,” said Sara Johnson, senior and Fundraising Chair for the club. “This one is better for newer members who have only been to one or two conferences in the past.”
One month later, April 7 to 10, the MUN-ers will travel to UCLA for the All-Crisis Conference. UCLA hosts what are termed “historical conferences,” meaning the themes are based upon past diplomatic conflicts. The conferences are made up of committees that are assigned specific scenarios to negotiate: NATO versus the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, and Wikileaks scandal as managed by the U.S. State Department.
“UCLA will be a partially historical and partially pop-culture conference, which makes it more fun to attend,” Johnson said.
The MUN-ers believe that the three conferences they attended last semester in Orange County, Santa Barbara and Georgetown have prepared them well for their upcoming competitions. “The Georgetown conference in particular put us in an environment where we were competing with people from all over the country,” said Mahad Ghani, a sophomore MUN@USD member. “It definitely generated a spirit of cooperation and was exciting because we could meet and network with people who will be working in the same line of work.”
Georgetown was a unique experience for the group because it was the first time MUN@USD participated in an East Coast conference, and it allowed the students to tour the sights of Washington D.C.
In addition to the MUN@USD club meetings, political science professor Mary McKenzie teaches a MUN class that can be taken for three credits. Requirements include attendance at one conference and completion of a position paper (to be presented at a conference). The position paper helps students to understand the diplomatic details of a country before acting as a representative at a conference.
“MUN@USD is very exciting this year, and the program is growing by leaps and bounds,” McKenzie said. “I’m so proud because our students are great MUN-ers and great representatives of USD.”
Two members in particular were honored for their participation last semester. Sophomore Dylan Heyden won an honorable mention at the Orange County conference, and sophomore Sophia Carrillo won an outstanding delegate award at Santa Barbara.
“In today’s world,” Carrillo said, “security, multilateral relations and peacekeeping have reached such a catalytic flashpoint that it’s necessary to educate yourself on world affairs and positions of global hegemony. I think my MUN experience has really given me the opportunity to achieve that.”
Funding for MUN@USD’s conferences has come largely from an anonymous grant of $100,000, received last spring. The club is authorized to spend $10,000 of the grant annually to cover travel and registration fees.
“We are so fortunate to have the grant to fund MUN,” Johnson said. “We do, however, want to expand our program and bring more students to conferences, so this semester will be our first attempt at active fundraising. Previously, it was all word of mouth. This was also our first semester having a table at the Alcala Bazaar.”
As they prepare for nationals in New York, the MUN-ers are excited to compete with major collegiate Model UN clubs from around the country. Students interested in joining MUN@USD can contact Mary McKenzie during office hours at
UCLA Loneliness Scale measures how lonely people are
With 20 quick and simple questions, UCLA-affiliated researchers can assess the extent of a person’s loneliness.
Known as the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the brief survey was developed in the late 1970s to fill a void in psychological research.
“It was an important psychological phenomenon that we didn’t know much about and it piqued my curiosity,” said Letitia Anne Peplau, psychology professor and an author of the study.
Since then, the scale has been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish and Japanese, and used for college surveys, such as a recent poll of Iowa State University freshmen as well as telephone questionnaires.
With her then-graduate students Daniel Russell and Carolyn Cutrona, Peplau created a set of questions to quantitatively measure a person’s loneliness. After reading statements like “I lack companionship,” or “I am unhappy being so withdrawn,” patients would rate how often they felt that way, said Russell, now a professor of human development and family studies at Iowa State University.
When the study was first completed in the early 1980s, Peplau’s team found that students who were lonely reported less involvement with friends and social activities. Furthermore, students who were involved in casual dating or serious relationships had much lower scores of loneliness.
Age also played a factor. While younger students looked for friendships in their early years of college, older students placed a greater emphasis on romantic relationships.
The researchers then compared the results within the test group and came to a conclusion.
“Loneliness isn’t hard to measure,” Peplau said. “If people are feeling that their relationships are inadequate, they know they’re lonely. They’ll tell researchers about it.”
But not all people who spend time alone are lonely. This distinction relates to the difference between loneliness and social isolation.
While loneliness implies a feeling of dissatisfaction with the quality of current relationships or lack thereof, social isolation simply describes a person who is alone, Peplau said. People may choose to be alone, and Peplau said there is no evidence that people who are alone in living situations are more lonely than people who live in more communal environments. Similarly, people can be lonely while surrounded by others.
At UCLA, the process of meeting new people may be difficult, especially at the beginning of college. For Joseph Truong, a second-year biology student, the transition into college was a little lonely. He didn’t join clubs his first quarter to focus on academics, and with a dormitory floor full of second years, it was difficult to make friends, he added.
“I think if I had first years (on the floor), it would have been different,” he said.
While loneliness is tied to emotions, it is also related to biological factors.
“There’s growing evidence of a human need to be attached to a person,” Peplau said. “We’re social animals.”
This social impulse could relate to circuitry and structures in the brain. Some hormones are geared toward social interaction, such as oxytocin, which has the potential to affect the development of relationships, said Steve Lee, assistant professor of clinical psychology.
Another part of the brain, the fusiform gyrus, is a socioemotional center of the brain that is geared toward accurately reading people’s expressions, Lee said.
In Truong’s case, he was able to make friends in his small discussion section for his GE cluster. These friends also crossed over into his other classes, and this year, his floor is much more social.
But along with the changing social atmosphere, Truong said he has also changed.
“I think I’ve become more outgoing,” he said

