About

Xiaoren Tang is a Research Assistant Professor of Periodontology at the Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine at Boston University. He holds a PhD in Genetics from Tokyo University, obtained in 1990. His professional focus is on periodontology, and he is affiliated with the faculty at the dental school. His research and academic contributions are centered around advancing knowledge in the field of periodontal health and disease, supporting the school's mission to provide state-of-the-art dental care through education, research, and community service.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Psychology
• Cancer research
• Psychiatry
• Biochemistry
• Pathology
• Chemistry
• Clinical psychology

Selected publications

• Steady-state thermal analysis of reverse circulation drill power head based on thermal network method

  Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2026-02-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract The power head is one of the core components of a reverse circulation drill, providing the necessary torque and rotation for the drill pipe and tools. The thermal network method is applied in this paper to establish steady-state thermal equilibrium equations for key positions of the power head, developing computational models for heat sources, thermal resistances, and convective heat transfer coefficients. The steady-state temperature distribution of the power head is obtained by solving nodal temperatures from the thermal equilibrium equations, with experimental validation performed on selected node temperatures. It is shown that gear tooth surfaces and bearing rings exhibit higher temperatures than other positions, with the driving gear’s tooth surface reaching peak temperatures. The steady-state thermal analysis is conducted in accordance with fundamental thermodynamic laws, and theoretical temperature values are found to be within acceptable error margins. The findings of this study lay a theoretical foundation for the thermo-mechanical coupling analysis of components within the reverse circulation drill power head.

  PublisherDOI

• Suppression of Lipopolysaccharide-Induced Cytokine Production by Chemokine Ligand-1 Short Hairpin RNA

  Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research · 2026-04-28

  articleSenior author

  Objectives: Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from oral Gram-negative bacteria induces inflammatory responses involving the chemokine CXCL1. Although CXCL1 is known to mediate inflammation, its role in disease processes remains incompletely understood. This study aimed to investigate the biological function of CXCL1, evaluate shRNAs as inhibitors, and determine whether CXCL1 suppression is associated with reduced LPS-induced cytokine production. Materials and Methods: Human CXCL1 cDNA was cloned into recombinant plasmid DNA and transfected into THP-1 monocyte-like cells. CXCL1-regulated cytokines, including tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and IL-1β, were quantified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) following treatment with pharmacologic and molecular inhibitors. Multiple CXCL1-targeting shRNAs were designed, synthesized, and tested. The specificity of CXCL1 shRNA-mediated inhibition of LPS-induced proteins was analyzed using ELISA and a hybrid method analysis. Results: Treatment with a Janus kinase inhibitor or CXCL1 shRNA#2 significantly suppressed CXCL1 expression, resulting in reduced production of TNF-α and other pro-inflammatory cytokines, suggesting a regulatory role for CXCL1. CXCL1 shRNA#2 also markedly inhibited LPS-induced chemokines, kinases, transcription factors, and apoptotic genes, demonstrating broad anti-inflammatory effects. Conclusions: CXCL1 appears to play a regulatory role in LPS-dependent inflammatory pathways, and its suppression by shRNA or pharmacologic inhibitors effectively reduces cytokine production. These findings provide insight into CXCL1-associated mechanisms while highlighting the need for further mechanistic studies to elucidate the precise signaling pathways involved and may inform the development of potential therapeutic strategies for inflammatory diseases.

  PublisherDOI

• Fault Diagnosis of Core Drilling Rig Gearbox Based on Transformer and DCA-xLSTM

  Applied Sciences · 2025-12-05

  articleOpen access

  The gearbox is a core component of drilling rigs, valued for its high efficiency and load capacity. However, prolonged operation under heavy loads makes it prone to wear and failure. Complicating diagnosis, the vibration signals generated are highly complex and nonlinear. To achieve accurate fault diagnosis under varying operating conditions, we propose a novel method named T-DCAx, which integrates a Dual-path Convolutional Attention network, an extended Long Short-Term Memory network (xLSTM), and a Transformer. Our model leverages the complementary strengths of these components: the xLSTM module, enhanced with exponential gating and a novel memory mechanism, excels at modeling long-term temporal dependencies and mitigating gradient vanishing issues. The Transformer module effectively captures global contextual information through self-attention. These are synergized with a dual-path convolutional attention structure to ensure effective joint learning of both local–temporal and global patterns. Finally, a dedicated gearbox test platform was established to collect vibration signals under various conditions and fault types. The proposed T-DCAx method was validated on this dataset and demonstrated superior performance against several benchmark methods in comparative analyses.

  PublisherDOI

• Effect of Normal Load and Temperature on the Tribo-Corrosion Behaviors of 20CrMnTi Alloy Steel

  Journal of Materials Engineering and Performance · 2024-12-28 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Towards a major methodological shift in depression research by assessing continuous scores of recurrence of illness, lifetime and current suicidal behaviors and phenome features

  Journal of Affective Disorders · 2024 · 36 citations

  • Psychology
  • Clinical psychology
  • Psychiatry

  BACKGROUND: The binary major depressive disorder (MDD) diagnosis is inadequate and should never be used in research. AIMS: The study's objective is to explicate our novel precision nomothetic strategy for constructing depression models based on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), lifetime and current phenome, and biomarker (atherogenicity indices) scores. METHODS: This study assessed recurrence of illness (ROI: namely recurrence of depressive episodes and suicidal behaviors, SBs), lifetime and current SBs and the phenome of depression, neuroticism, dysthymia, anxiety disorders, and lipid biomarkers including apolipoprotein (Apo)A, ApoB, free cholesterol and cholesteryl esters, triglycerides, high density lipoprotein cholesterol in 67 normal controls and 66 MDD patients. We computed atherogenic and reverse cholesterol transport indices. RESULTS: We were able to extract one factor from a) the lifetime phenome of depression comprising ROI, and traits such as neuroticism, dysthymia and anxiety disorders, and b) the phenome of the acute phase (based on depression, anxiety and quality of life scores). PLS analysis showed that 55.7 % of the variance in the lifetime + current phenome factor was explained by increased atherogenicity, neglect and sexual abuse, while atherogenicity partially mediated the effects of neglect. Cluster analysis generated a cluster of patients with major dysmood disorder, which was externally validated by increased atherogenicity and characterized by increased scores of all clinical features. CONCLUSIONS: The outcome of depression should not be represented as a binary variable (MDD or not), but rather as multiple dimensional scores based on biomarkers, ROI, subclinical depression traits, and lifetime and current phenome scores including SBs.

  DOI

• Research on the Wear Evolution Behavior of 20CrMnTi Alloy Steel under Different Loading Conditions

  Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2024-06-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract 20CrMnTi alloy steel has excellent surface hardness and good wear resistance, making it widely used in the preparation of key components of various high-speed and high-load gearboxes, such as gear, rack, and bearing. However, the existence of friction and wear behavior in service leads to various damage behaviors, which seriously affects its service stability and effective life. Based on experimental research and numerical simulation technology, this study reveals the damage evolution law of 20CrMnTi low carbon alloy steel under different wear load conditions. It is shown that the increase of wear load and time duration will obviously lead to the increase of contact stress and deformation of the material surface, and eventually lead to an increase in wear degree. The research findings provide experimental support and theoretical guidance for effectively predicting the damage law in actual service.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A hybrid technique for measurement of intra/extracellular proteins

  PLoS ONE · 2023-05-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  ELISA or Western blot is known as a basic technique to be used for measurement of intracellular proteins, but in some cases, they cannot overcome problems such as normalization between samples or extraneous costs for required commercial kits. In order to address this problem, we developed a rapid and effective method (a hybrid of Western blot and ELISA). We use this new hybrid method to detect and normalize trace protein changes in gene expression intracellularly at a lower cost.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• "A Hybrid Technique for Measurement of Intracellular Proteins"

  Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research · 2022-05-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research (BJSTR) is a multidisciplinary, scholarly Open Access publisher focused on Genetic, Biomedical and Remedial missions in relation with Technical Knowledge as well. Our BJSTR maintains a scrupulous, methodical, fair peer review System. Besides, quality control is riveted in each step of the publication process.

  PublisherDOI

• The role of TNF-α induced protein 1 in the activation of pro-apoptotic proteins

  Human Cell · 2021-04-28 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The pathogenic mechanism of oral bacteria and treatment with inhibitors

  Clinical and Experimental Dental Research · 2021-10-09 · 4 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to introduce the evidence obtained through extensive research that periodontitis increases risk of many systemic diseases. METHOD: Analysis of some oral bacteria (P. gingivalis, T. denticola, T. forsythia, A. actinomycetemcomitans, and F. nucleatum) and its related treatments and mediators by the specific methods (western blot, ELISA, etc). RESULTS: This article reviews in detail the evidence obtained through extensive research that periodontitis increases risk of many systemic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer's disease. These diseases are known to be associated with some certain specific gram-negative bacteria as periodontal pathogens, which induce inflammation and related diseases through TLR receptors, kinases, transcriptional factors and other cytokines. We also reviewed the latest research for inhibitors against inflammation and related diseases that have potential to be further applied clinically. In addition, based on a large amount of research evidence, we draw two tables about the mechanism of disease caused by periodontal bacteria, so that readers can easily search and analyze these research results. DISCUSSION: This review details how the periodontal bacteria and their virulence factors can trigger host immune defense and induce many systemic diseases via inflammation and invasion. This Review also addressed the latest research around inhibitors against inflammation.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R21AI079370

  NIH · $444k · 2012

Frequent coauthors

• Jianzhuang Liu

  Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology

  45 shared

• Salomon Amar

  16 shared

• Michaël Maes

  Thai Red Cross Society

  14 shared

• Xiaogang Wang

  Harbin Institute of Technology

  12 shared

• Dahua Lin

  12 shared

• Chunjing Xu

  BGI Genomics

  12 shared

• Shuicheng Yan

  Nagase ChemteX (Japan)

  12 shared

• Chen Change Loy

  11 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Tokyo University

  1990