Black porous silicon as a photothermal agent and immunoadjuvant for efficient antitumor immunotherapy.

Photothermal therapy (PTT) in combination with other treatment modalities has shown great potential to activate immunotherapy against tumor metastasis. However, the nanoparticles (NPs) that generate PTT have served as the photothermal agent only. Moreover, researchers have widely utilized highly immunogenic tumor models to evaluate the immune response of these NPs thus giving over-optimistic results.

Downregulation of Methyltransferase-Like 14 Promotes Ovarian Cancer Cell Proliferation Through Stabilizing TROAP mRNA.

Altered expression levels of the proteins that regulate N6-methyladenosine (mA) RNA methylation, including methyltransferase-like 14 (METTL14), are associated with cancer development. Based on our analysis of mA methylation regulators using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets, we focused on the regulatory role of METTL14 in ovarian cancer. We performed bioinformatics and survival analyses with these datasets and also used METTL14-overexpressing SKOV-3 ovarian cancer cells for studies.

Tailored Synthesis of PEGylated Bismuth Nanoparticles for X-ray Computed Tomography and Photothermal Therapy: One-Pot, Targeted Pyrolysis, and Self-Promotion.

Complex experimental design is a common problem in the preparation of theranostic nanoparticles, resulting in poor reaction control, expensive production cost, and low experiment success rate. The present study aims to develop PEGylated bismuth (PEG-Bi) nanoparticles with a precisely controlled one-pot approach, which contains only methoxy[(poly(ethylene glycol)]trimethoxy-silane (PEG-silane) and bismuth oxide (BiO). A targeted pyrolysis of PEG-silane was achieved to realize its roles as both the reduction and PEGylation agents.

The Establishment and Application Studies on Precise Lysosome pH Indicator Based on Self-Decomposable Nanoparticles.

Acidic pH of lysosomes is closely related to autophagy; thus, well known of the precise lysosomes, pH changes will give more information on the autophagy process and status. So far, however, only pH changes in a relatively broad range could be indicated, the exact lysosomes pH detection has never arrived. In our study, we established an endo/lysosome pH indicator based on the self-decomposable SiO nanoparticle system with specific synthesis parameters.

Supramolecular Drug-Drug Complex Vesicles Enable Sequential Drug Release for Enhanced Combination Therapy.

Drug-drug self-delivery systems serving as both carriers and cargos have been explored as advanced combination chemotherapy strategies to overcome the limitations of the traditional single-drug chemotherapy. However, most known drug-drug self-delivery systems may cause a rapid increase in drug concentration when the single covalent bond is broken, thus leading to high toxicity to organs and low therapeutic efficiency against tumors. To address the above problem, in this study, a novel supramolecular drug-drug complex (SDDC) simultaneously containing both covalent and noncovalent bonds was proposed to realize the sequential release of two drugs in tumor cells for enhanced combination therapy.

Low-Dose X-ray Excited Photodynamic Therapy Based on NaLuF:Tb-Rose Bengal Nanocomposite.

X-ray excited photodynamic therapy (X-PDT), which utilizes X-rays as the energy source and X-ray luminescent nanoparticles (XLNPs) as the transducer to excite photosensitizers (PS), resolves the penetration problem of light in traditional PDT to enable the treatment of deep-seated tumors. Nevertheless, the high X-ray dosage used in X-PDT hampers its potential applications in clinics. In this study, to alleviate the dose problem, β-NaLuF:Tb spherical nanoparticles (NPs) with ultrastrong green X-ray excited optical luminescence (XEOL) due to the less nonradiative relaxation probability and high X-ray absorption mass coefficient, which perfectly matches the absorption spectrum of a photosensitizer named rose bengal (RB), were synthesized and employed as the energy transducer for X-PDT.

Serum long noncoding RNA urothelial carcinoma-associated 1: A novel biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma.

Objective Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) offer great potential as cancer biomarkers. This study was performed to assess the applicability of serum lncRNA urothelial carcinoma-associated 1 (UCA1) as a diagnostic and/or prognostic biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods We examined UCA1 expression in serum samples from 105 patients with HCC, 105 patients with benign liver disease (BLD), and 105 healthy volunteers using reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction and analyzed the relationship between serum UCA1 and clinicopathological parameters of HCC as well as survival.

Overexpression of PAD4 suppresses drug resistance of NSCLC cell lines to gefitinib through inhibiting Elk1-mediated epithelial-mesenchymal transition.

It is reported that epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) could induce resistance in tumor cells, and knockdown of peptidylarginine deiminase IV (PAD4) induces the activity of EMT. However, the role of PAD4 in gefitinib‑acquired resistance in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) remains unclear. In this study, we aimed to investigate the role of PAD4 in the resistance of NSCLC to gefitinib.