Methods and Protocol for Single-Cell Motility Assays under Topological Constraints.

The extracellular environment plays a crucial role in many physiological and pathological processes involving cell motility, such as metastatic invasion in cancer development, by heavily impacting the migration strategies adopted by the cells. The study of how mechanical constraints affect the dynamics of cell migration may be relevant to gain more insight into such processes, and it may prove to be a powerful tool in the hands of biologists. In this chapter, we describe the methods used to investigate the ability of neoplastic cells to migrate through narrowing, rigid microstructures upon chemoattractant stimulation.

Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Efficacy Outcomes from Immune Checkpoint Blockade in Patients with Cancer.

Purpose: No evidence exists as to whether type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) impairs clinical outcome from immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) in patients with solid tumors.

Experimental Design: In a large cohort of ICI recipients treated at 21 institutions from June 2014 to June 2020, we studied whether patients on glucose-lowering medications (GLM) for T2DM had shorter overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS). We used targeted transcriptomics in a subset of patients to explore differences in the tumor microenvironment (TME) of patients with or without diabetes.

Microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip for Studies of Cell Migration under Spatial Confinement.

Understanding cell migration is a key step in unraveling many physiological phenomena and predicting several pathologies, such as cancer metastasis. In particular, confinement has been proven to be a key factor in the cellular migration strategy choice. As our insight in the field improves, new tools are needed in order to empower biologists' analysis capabilities.

Anthracycline-Free Neoadjuvant Treatment in Patients with HER2-Positive Breast Cancer: Real-Life Use of Pertuzumab, Trastuzumab and Taxanes Association with an Exploratory Analysis of PIK3CA Mutational Status.

HER2 is considered one of the most traditional prognostic and predictive biomarkers in breast cancer. Literature data confirmed that the addition of pertuzumab to a standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy backbone (either with or without anthracyclines), in patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive early breast cancer (EBC), leads to a higher pathological complete response (pCR) rate, which is known to correlate with a better prognosis. In this retrospective analysis, 47 consecutive patients with HER2-positive EBC received sequential anthracyclines and taxanes plus trastuzumab (ATH) or pertuzumab, trastuzumab and docetaxel (THP).