WesternU holds its first Juneteenth celebration

WesternU held its first Juneteenth celebration on Wednesday, June 14, 2023.

Special guest speakers Jeanette EllisRoyston and the Rev. Ted Burnett from the NAACP Pomona Valley Branch provided a history lesson and a call to action for WesternU students, faculty and staff watching in person in Pomona, California and via livestream at WesternU Oregon in Lebanon, Oregon.

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Congratulations to the Emergency Department Externship for Nursing (EDEN) students who completed over 400 hours of combined Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) novice clinical pathway modules and clinical hours. Pictured left to right: Alex Taylor, Kelly Chester, Jessika Hinojosa and Payaam Elmi.



The dedication and hard work put forth by the students is commendable. Professor Katlin Gallagher’s weekly classes played a significant role in reinforcing emergency concepts and enhancing the student’s knowledge and skills. Professors like her play a crucial role in shaping the future of nursing professionals. A special thanks also goes to the San Antonio Regional Hospital staff for their teaching and support throughout the program. Their guidance and mentorship were invaluable to the students during their clinical experience.

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An interprofessional WesternU team presented its "I Belong" 360 project at the Educause Learning Initiative annual conference on June 9, 2023 in Anaheim, California.

Tracy Mendolia-Moore from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, Dr. Ruth Trudgeon and Marsha Guillaume from the College of Graduate Nursing, and Dr. Tammie Keller Johnson from the College of Health Sciences (pictured above), presented “Ready, (head)Set, Go!”

They represented an interprofessional team that also includes CETL's Joe Marilo, CHS's Dr. Harsha Deoghare, Dr. Valerie Quan from the College of Optometry, Dr. Joshua Cameron from the Office of the President, and Dr. David Dickter from the Department of Assessment, Leadership & Organizational Effectiveness. 

The group provided a presentation on creating the VR experience and shared the outcomes of the project. The team also provided audience members the opportunity to experience the VR scenario using headsets and iPads.

Dr. Anu M Räisänen, College of Health Sciences-Northwest Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy Education - Oregon, recently published two articles that contributed to the 6th International Conference on Concussion in Sport. The consensus statement, the methods paper and all the systematic reviews that provided evidence for the consensus were recently published in two special issues of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Yeates KO, Räisänen AM, Premji Z, Debert C, Frémont P, Hinds S, Smirl J, Barlow K, Davis GA, Echemendia R, Feddermann-Demont N, Fuller C, Gagnon I, Giza CC, Iverson GL, Makdissi M, Schneider KJ. What tests and measures accurately diagnose persisting post-concussive symptoms in children, adolescents and adults following sport-related concussion? A systematic review. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2023;57:780-788.

Schneider KJ, Patricios J, Meeuwisse W, Schneider GM, Hayden KA, Premji Z, Ahmed OH, Blauwet C, Broglio SP, Cantu RC, Davis GA, Dvorak J, Echemendia R, Emery CA, Iverson GL, Leddy JJ, Makdissi M, McCreA MA, McNamee M, Putukian M, Yeates KO, Black AM, Burma JS, Critchley M, Eliason P, Räisänen AM, Jason Tabor J, Toomey C, Paul Ronksley P, Cassidy JD. The Amsterdam 2022 Process: A Summary of the Methodology for the International Consensus on Concussion in Sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2023;57:712-721.

Drs. Finosh Thankam and Devendra K. Agrawal from the COMP Department of Translational Research published an original research article with COMP students and alumni Pauline Valerie Chen, Dr. Ahmad Rashad, Dr. Ankit Gangrade, Dr. Natan Roberto de Barros and Jonathan Tam, and collaborators from other institutions, as follows:

Chen PV, Rashad A, Gangrade A, Barros NR, Khademhosseini A, Tam J, Varadarajan P, Agrawal DK, Thankam FG: Stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte-like cells in myocardial regeneration. Tissue Eng Part B Rev. 2023 Jun 9. doi: 10.1089/ten.TEB.2023.0049. Online ahead of print. PMID: 37294202

Dr. Agrawal also collaborated with researchers at other institutions on: Hammer SS, Dorweiler TF, McFarland D, Adu-Agyeiwaah Y, Mast N, El-Darzi N, Fortmann SD, Nooti S, Agrawal DK, Pikuleva IA, Abela GS, Grant MB, Busik JV: Cholesterol crystal formation is a unifying pathogenic mechanism in the development of diabetic retinopathy. Diabetologia. 2023 Jun 14. doi: 10.1007/s00125-023-05949-w. Online ahead of print. PMID: 37311879

Congratulations to the following Department of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Sciences Faculty, and their collaborators, on their most recent accomplishments:

Dr. Peter Oelschlaeger completed a data modeling course from the Harvard University Extension School.

The publication of the following two research articles, both of which are the result of collaborations with COP PharmD and MSPS students and colleagues from BPSD, PPAD, COMP, CPM, Ketchum University, USC, and City of Hope.

Pharmacokinetics comparison of vardenafil as administered by an intranasal spray formulation vs a 10-mg oral tablet, Wang J (BPSD), Chow SL (PPAD), Chow MSS (PPAD), Paik A (MSPS 2019), Louie SG (USC), Dong F (CPM), Sathananthan A (COMP), White S (COMP) J Sex Med. 2023 May 4:qdad056. doi: 10.1093/jsxmed/qdad056. Online ahead of print. PMID: 37147929

Effects of bariatric surgery on drug pharmacokinetics - Preclinical studies. Mercado A (PharmD 2023), Pham A (PharmD 2024), Wang Z (Ketchum University), Huang W (City of Hope), Chan P (PPAD), Ibrahim H (Kaiser San Jose), Gogineni H (PPAD), Huang Y (BPSD), Wang J (BPSD) Front Pharmacol. 2023 Apr 5;14:1133415. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2023.1133415. eCollection 2023. PMID: 37089960 PMCID: PMC10113450

Drs. Bradley Andresen, Jianming Xie, and Peter Oelschlaeger were awarded a 2023-24 Intramural Award by the University Research Office. Their project summaries:

Dr. Bradley Andresen: G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the most pharmacologically targeted protein class by all approved drugs, demonstrating their importance to medicine. Strikingly, many GPCRs lack ligand pairing (orphans) yet are implicated in disease. Based on the number of clinically targeted GPCRs, the potential for orphan GPCRs to be medically significant is high. Therefore, there is a need to identify ligands to orphan receptors. De-orphaning GPCRs is defined as identifying the physiological ligand to the receptor, which is challenging. However, if synthetic agonists and antagonists can be characterized, further experiments can be conducted to understand the physiological and clinical relevance of a GPCR independent of the cognate ligand. Recent advancements in machine learning provide protein structures and docking algorithms allowing for screening 109 compounds to proteins with no experimentally-derived structural data. The hypothesis of this study is that active and inactive AlphaFold models of GPCRs can serve as targets in active learning Glide (AL-Glide) to elucidate novel ligands. As a test case, this proposal focuses on GPR18 (N-Arachidonylglycine receptor). GPR18 is pharmacologically similar to the cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2; therefore, the CB1 and CB2 receptors can serve as controls.

Dr. Jianming Xie: Chimeric antigen receptor natural killer (CAR-NK) cells are being actively developed to treat acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the most common leukemia in adults. However, current CAR-NK cells can induce unwanted killing of normal myeloid cells because the target antigens are not cancer-specific. Dr. Xie’s team aims to enhance the anti-cancer specificity by additionally targeting HLA-DR loss, a cancer immune escape mechanism found in many AML patients.

Dr. Peter Oelschlaeger: Enzymes able to hydrolyze and cause resistance to b-lactam antibiotics are called b-lactamases and are grouped into four classes (A-D). Class B b-lactamases (BBLs) employ zinc ions and are also known as metallo-b-lactamases (MBLs). BBLs have a unique conserved structure including zinc ligands, which has prompted researchers to develop the BBL standard numbering scheme. Because elements between conserved residues can vary, the standard numbering can be quite complex and require insertions and deletions. As a result, renumbering all amino acids in the enzyme sequence manually is tedious, and recently the BBL numbering has been utilized less, especially since the advent of the New Delhi MBL (NDM) enzymes. Therefore, we have written Python programs that can automatically renumber NDM amino acids in sequence (FASTA) and structure (PDB) files to conform with the BBL standard numbering. The goal of this grant is to expand these programs to other BBL enzymes and make them freely accessible by designing a website.