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A promising paradigm for drug administration that has garnered increasing attention in recent years is the direct transfer (DT) of nanoparticles for transcellular drug delivery. DT requires direct cell-cell contact and facilitates unidirectional and bidirectional matter exchange between neighboring cells. Consequently, DT enables fast and deep penetration of drugs into the targeted tissues. This comprehensive review discusses the direct transfer concept, which can be delineated into the following three distinct modalities: membrane contact-direct transfer, gap junction-mediated direct transfer (GJ-DT), and tunneling nanotubes-mediated direct transfer (TNTs-DT). Further, the intercellular structures for each modality of direct transfer and their respective merits and demerits are summarized. The review also discusses the recent progress on the drugs or drug delivery systems that could activate DT.

In this study, we aimed to clarify the role of PIM-1 in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) in vitro and investigate the relationship between PIM-1 and redox proteins (NOX4, SOD2, and GPX2) at the tissue and cellular levels. As a PIM-1 inhibitor, SGI-1776 inhibited cell proliferation, colony formation, migration and induced an increase in apoptosis and reactive oxygen species in two PTC cell lines (BCPAP and TPC-1). The expressions of PIM-1, SOD2 and GPX2 were downregulated after siNOX4 exposure. Immunohistochemistry in 120 PTC patients showed that all four proteins exhibited higher expression levels in PTC tissues than in adjacent normal tissues. PIM-1 expression was related to NOX4, SOD2, and GPX2 expressions. The Cancer Genome Atlas database analysis showed the significant correlation between the expression of NOX4 and PIM-1. Our results demonstrated that PIM-1 played an important oncogenic role in PTC carcinogenesis that may be related to oxidative stress., (Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This study sought to investigate minichromosome maintenance protein 3 (MCM3) and minichromosome maintenance protein 7 (MCM7) expression in salivary adenoid cystic carcinoma (SACC) samples, and to evaluate the relationship between clinicopathological characteristics and prognosis. The expressions of MCM3 and MCM7 were evaluated using immunohistochemistry of tissue sections from SACC patients, and statistical analyses were performed to evaluate the associations between MCM expression and clinicopathological variables and to analyze the disease-free survival (DFS) and prognostic factors. The positive expression rates of MCM3 and MCM7 in SACC were 98.8% and 96.6%, respectively. MCM3 expression correlated with T-stage and nerve invasion. MCM7 expression correlated with T-stage, adjacent tissue invasion, nerve invasion, and prognosis, and was negatively associated with DFS. However, there was no significant correlation between MCM3 expression and DFS. A kappa analysis demonstrated that MCM3 was closely associated with MCM7. MCM7 may be a favorable prognosis indicator in SACC., Competing Interests: None., (IJCEP Copyright © 2018.)