Publications by authors named "Zhengwen Fang"

Infectious acute pneumonia caused by bacteria has been a great challenge to human health for long time, and the rapid clearance of aerosolized antibiotics in the lungs restricts their clinical application. The development of nanoformulations with facile preparation and mucoadhesive properties for the pulmonary delivery of antibiotics is thus significant for the treatment of infectious acute pneumonia. In this study, FDA (Food and Drug Administration)-approved tannic acid (TA) was used to construct mucoadhesive nanoformulations through the facile coating of chitosan (CS) to achieve long-lasting anti-infection effects against infectious acute pneumonia.

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Proper repair of DNA damage lesions is essential to maintaining genome integrity and preventing the development of human diseases, including cancer. Increasing evidence suggests the importance of the nuclear envelope in the spatial regulation of DNA repair, although the mechanisms of such regulatory processes remain poorly defined. Through a genome-wide synthetic viability screen for PARP-inhibitor resistance using an inducible CRISPR-Cas9 platform and BRCA1-deficient breast cancer cells, we identified a transmembrane nuclease (renamed NUMEN) that could facilitate compartmentalized and non-homologous end joining-dependent repair of double-stranded DNA breaks at the nuclear periphery.

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Immunotherapy as an alternative treatment strategy for B-cell lymphoma is undesirable because of tumor heterogeneity and immune surveillance. Spermidine (SPM), as a regulator of the tumor microenvironment (TME), can facilitate the release of damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) from cancer cells, promote immune recognition, and thus alleviate immune surveillance in the TME. Hence, in this work, self-assembled spermidine-based metal-immunopeptide nanocomplexes (APP-Fe NCs; APP is anti-programmed death ligand-1 peptide) with pH-responsive release kinetics were prepared via the flash nanocomplexation (FNC) technique based on the noncovalent interaction between APP-SPM-dextran (DEX) and sodium tripolyphosphate (TPP) and coordination between Fe and TPP.

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RNA editing is prevalent in the transcriptome and is important for multiple cellular processes. C-to-U RNA editing sites (RES) are relatively rare and understudied in humans, compared to A-to-I editing. However, the functional impact of C-to-U editing in human cancers also remains elusive.

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The active X chromosome in mammals is upregulated to balance its dosage to autosomes during evolution. However, it is elusive why the known dosage compensation machinery showed uneven and small influence on X genes. Here, based on >20,000 transcriptomes, we identified two X gene groups (ploidy-sensitive [PSX] and ploidy-insensitive [PIX]), showing distinct but evolutionarily conserved dosage compensations (termed XAR).

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Gemcitabine, as a standard and classic strategy for B-cell lymphoma in the clinic, is limited by its poor pharmacodynamics. Although stimuli-responsive polymeric nanodelivery systems have been widely investigated in the past decade, issues such as complicated procedures, low loading capacity, and uncontrollable release kinetics still hinder their clinical translation. In view of the above considerations, we attempt to construct hyperbranched polyprodrug micelles with considerable drug loading via simple procedures and make use of the particularity of the tumor microenvironment to ensure that the micelles are "inactivated" in normal tissues and "activated" in the tumor microenvironment.

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The hypoxic microenvironment is presumed to be a sanctuary for myeloid leukemia cells that causes relapse following chemotherapy, but the underlying mechanism remains elusive. Using a zebrafish xenograft model, we observed that the hypoxic hematopoietic tissue preserved most of the chemoresistant leukemic cells following the doxorubicin (Dox) treatment. And hypoxia upregulated TFEB, a master regulator of lysosomal biogenesis, and increased lysosomes in leukemic cells.

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