Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Ankle monitors are not the bright, kind alternative to incarceration that they are made to be. Advocates propose them as a solution to overcrowded carceral sites and excessive federal expenditure on public corrections agencies. Their logic being we can release certain incarcerated people to reduce prison, jail, and detention center populations and require them to pay for their monitoring to reduce prison expenditures. While there is potential for ankle monitors to achieve these aspirations, it is necessary to recognize how and where they can produce harm. Rather than being an alternative to incarceration, ankle monitors are a method of incarceration. They serve the same functions and hold the same power as prisons and jails with a more elusive form. In the current implementation of ankle monitors, we see individual bodies being transformed into sources of data to be capitalized upon by the government and private companies. Along with this, there is a shift of the financial burden of incarceration from prisons to the person being punished. This acts to further perpetuate the cycles of poverty and financial oppression that are seen within traditional forms of incarceration. Ankle monitor advocates also claim ankle monitors allow incarcerated people to enjoy freedom beyond prison walls and reintegrate into society. In reality, this is an oversimplification of freedom. Individuals with ankle monitors find themselves to be limited in their freedoms by restricted movement and stigmatization. They are unable to live a “normal” life because their ankle monitors prevent them from doing so. These people cannot move as they please, they cannot find and hold employment, and they cannot interact with people like they normally would. Ankle monitor usage must be critically examined and altered if it is to be considered a meaningful, gentle alternative to incarceration.

A major hindrance to advances in the care of patients with malignant gliomas is the presence of the blood brain barrier (BBB) and blood-brain tumor barrier (BBTB) that greatly restricts drug access from the plasma to the tumor cells. Bubble-assisted Focused Ultrasound (BAFUS) has proven effective in opening the BBB for treatment of glial tumors in adults and pediatric cases. BAFUS has been previously shown to disrupt noninvasively, selectively, and transiently the BBB in small animals in vivo. However, there is a lack of an in vitro preclinical model suitable for testing the genetic determinants of endothelial cell tight junction integrity and vulnerability to the physical disruption. Our BBB organ-on-chip platform will enable precision medicine of brain cancers through identifying patient-specific parameters by which to open the BBB allowing use of drugs and drug combinations otherwise unsuitable. We intend to sequence these in vitro models to verify that the genotype (alleles/SNPs) of tight junction proteins contribute to BBB structure and integrity. To initiate this effort, we report the development of an ultrasound transparent organ-on-chip model populated by iPSC-derived endothelial cells (iPSC-EC) co-cultured with astrocytes. Western blot, immunocytochemistry, and transelectrical endothelial resistance (TEER) studies all convey expression of key EC proteins and marked barrier integrity. Successful iPSC differentiation, tight junction formation, and annotation of tight junction alleles will be presented. Efforts are underway to benchmark device-ultrasound interactions, disruption vulnerability, and determine associations between iPSC-EC genotype and phenotype.