A liposome-based combination strategy using doxorubicin and a PI3K inhibitor efficiently inhibits pre-metastatic initiation by acting on both tumor cells and tumor-associated macrophages.

Pre-metastatic initiation is essential in tumor metastasis, and the inhibition of it could prevent the spread of cancers to distant organs. Both tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) and the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) play an important role in the pre-metastatic initiation stage. Herein, a liposome-based combination strategy which involves doxorubicin-loaded liposomes (Lip-Dox) and PI3K inhibitor-loaded liposomes (Lip-LY) was developed to simultaneously regulate tumor cells and TAMs for inhibiting pre-metastatic initiation.

Targeted Inhibition of Tumor Inflammation and Tumor-Platelet Crosstalk by Nanoparticle-Mediated Drug Delivery Mitigates Cancer Metastasis.

Sowing malignant cells (the "seeds" of metastasis) to engraft secondary sites requires a conducive premetastatic niche (PMN, the "soil" of metastasis). Inflammation and tumor associated platelet (TAP) has been hijacked by primary tumors to induce PMN "soil" in distant organs, as well as facilitate the dissemination of "seeds". This study reports a combinatory strategy with activated platelet-targeting nanoparticles to aim at the dynamic process of entire cancer metastasis, which exerts robust antimetastasis efficacy by simultaneously inhibiting tumor inflammation and tumor-platelet crosstalk.

Improving anti-PD-L1 therapy in triple negative breast cancer by polymer-enhanced immunogenic cell death and CXCR4 blockade.

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) with highly metastatic features generally does not respond to anti-programmed cell death 1 ligand 1 (PD-L1) therapy due to multiple immunosuppressive mechanisms to exclude and disable T cells. Here, we develop a polymer-based combinatory approach consisting of both immunogenic cell death (ICD)-inducing and CXCR4-inhibiting function to prime tumor microenvironment and improve anti-PD-L1 therapy in TNBC. Our findings revealed that the combination therapy was able to spur the T cell response in primary tumors by increasing the tumor immunogenicity to recruit T cells, removing the physiological barriers of intratumoral fibrosis and collagen to increase T cell infiltration, and reducing the immunosuppressive cells to revive T cells.

Multicore-Processor Based Software-Defined Communication/Network Platform for Underwater Internet of Things.

Software-defined acoustic modems (SDAMs) for underwater communication and networking have been an important research topic due to their flexibility and programmability. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable platform for SDAMs based on the TI AM5728 processor, which integrates dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPUs and two TI C66x DSP cores. The signal processing and A/D, D/A for physical-layer communication are implemented in the DSP cores.