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Liver cancer, mostly hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), is the second leading cause of cancer mortality globally. Most patients were diagnosed at an advanced stage, and systemic therapy is the standard of care. All the approved systemic therapies for HCC are molecular targeted therapies with anti-angiogenic effects targeting the vascular endothelial growth factor signaling pathway. Sorafenib and lenvatinib are the first-line treatment, and regorafenib, ramucirumab, and cabozantinib are second-line treatment options. Although anti-PD-1 antibodies, including nivolumab and pembrolizumab, demonstrated promising anti-tumor effects as monotherapy for advanced HCC in phase II clinical trials, both failed in phase III studies. Anti-angiogenic treatment remains the backbone of systemic therapy for HCC. In this review, we summarized the approved anti-angiogenic medicines and discussed the potential strategies to improve the efficacy of anti-angiogenic therapy, including combination therapy with other treatments, and discussed the approaches to overcome the drawbacks of anti-angiogenic therapies.

The phenomenon of enhanced invasion and metastasis of residual tumor cells has been observed in an increasing number of patients receiving chemoradiotherapy recently, and tumor metastasis will undoubtedly limit patient prognosis. However, the key mechanism by which chemoradiotherapy affects the invasion and metastasis of tumor cells remains unclear. Studies have shown that chemoradiotherapy may directly act on tumor cells and alter the tumor microenvironment, or induce cell apoptosis and autophagy to promote tumor cell survival and metastasis. In this review, we summarize the potential mechanisms by which chemoradiotherapy may affect the biological behavior of tumor cells and open up new avenues for reducing tumor recurrence and metastasis after treatment. These insights will improve the efficacy of chemoradiotherapy.

Concentrating solar power is the ideal way to solve the conflicts between energy and environment. Heat transfer and heat storage are the key links in solar thermal power generation, while molten salt is an excellent heat transfer and heat storage medium. Most of the solar thermal power stations operating at home and abroad use binary nitrates (solar salt) and ternary nitrates (Hitec). However, their low heat transfer and heat storage performance will affect the efficiency of solar energy utilization. The unique spatial structure of nanomaterials enables it to have excellent thermal conductivity and good stability. Introducing nanomaterials as additives into the nitrate molten salt system is expected to improve the thermal properties of the material such as heat transfer and heat storage, thereby improving the efficiency of solar thermal utilization and reducing the cost of power generation. In this paper, the related studies of nano metal particles, nano metal oxides, carbon nanomaterials, and other inorganic nanomaterials as doping additives in nitrate molten salt systems were reviewed. The changes in the thermal properties of molten salts after modification were discussed and the mechanism of action was explored, which can provide references for preparation of energy storage molten salt with excellent thermal properties. In the future research, the measurement of thermophysical properties, mechanism of heat transfer, quantitative structure-activity relationship and industrial pilot will be focused on, so that nitrate molten salt with excellent heat transfer and heat storage performance can be applied in the field of solar thermal power generation, which will play a more important role in the development and utilization of clean energy.

Abstract Background Exosomes play crucial roles in regulating the crosstalk between normal and cancer cells in the tumor microenvironment, and in regulating cancer proliferation, migration and invasion through their cargo molecules. Methods We analyzed the pro-invasiveness of exosomal circRNA-100,338 in HCC using the transwell invasion assay. The co-culture of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) and exosomes derived from HCC cell lines were used to evaluate the impact of HCC derived exosomes on HUVEC. Nude mice models were used to validate the findings in vitro. Clinically, quantitative RT-PCR was used to quantify the expression of serum exosomal circRNA-100,338 in HCC patients at both pre-surgery within one week and post-surgery within three weeks. Results We aim to investigate the pro-invasive role of exosomal circRNA-100,338 in HCC metastasis. We for the first time demonstrated that circRNA-100,338 was highly expressed in both highly metastatic HCC cells and their secreted exosomes. The transwell invasion assay showed that the overexpression or knockdown of exosomal circRNA-100,338 significantly enhanced or reduced the invasive abilities of HCC cells. Subsequently, in vitro and in vivo assays showed that exosomal circRNA-100,338 affected the cell proliferation, angiogenesis, permeability, and vasculogenic mimicry (VM) formation ability of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC), and tumor metastasis. Furthermore, we also observed that the persistent high expression of exosomal circRNA-100,338 in serum of HCC patients who underwent curative hepatectomy may be a risk indicator of pulmonary metastasis and poor survival. Conclusions Our findings indicated that metastatic ability of HCC cells could be enhanced by transferring exosomal circRNA-100,338 to recipient HUVECs, which could affect proangiogenic activity by regulating angiogenesis.

BackgroundHCC is one of the most common malignancies with an increasing incidence worldwide, especially in Asian countries. However, even though targeted cancer therapy drugs such as sorafenib and regorafenib are available, the overall outcome of HCC remains unsatisfactory. Thus, it is urgent to investigate the molecular mechanisms of HCC progression, so as to provide accurate diagnostic criteria and therapeutic targets.MethodsRNA-seq data was used to identify and quantify circular RNAs (circRNAs). DESeq2 was used to identify the differentially expressed circRNAs. miRNA binding sites within circRNAs were identified by miRanda. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was conducted to predict the biological function of circRNAs.ResultsThe differential expression analysis identified 107 upregulated and 95 downregulated circRNAs in HCC tissues. We observed that a differentially expressed circRNA (DE-circRNA), hsa_circ_0141900 was highly negatively correlated with its parental gene RAB1A (PCC < -0.6), which was also closely associated with mTOR signaling pathway. Moreover, we also constructed competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network to identify key circRNAs involved in HCC. Notably, hsa_circ_0002130 and hsa_circ_0008774 were highly correlated with the genes involved in gluconeogenesis and HNF3A pathway via the target genes, GOT2 and AR, suggesting that the two circRNAs might regulate these pathways, respectively. Survival analysis revealed that GOT2 was associated with favorable prognosis. Furthermore, high expression of hsa_circ_0002130 was found to inhibit tumor cell growth and promotes GOT2 expression.ConclusionIn summary, the circRNAs highlighted by the integrative analysis greatly improved our understanding of the underlying mechanism of circRNAs in HCC.

C23H22N2O4, monoclinic, P21/c (no. 14), a = 17.7478(4) Å, b = 10.0041(2) Å, c = 24.4749(6) Å, β = 111.111(2)°, V = 4053.88(17) Å3, Z = 8, Rgt(F) = 0.0614, wRref(F2) = 0.1749, T = 290 K.

C67H49Cl3N6O18, triclinic, P1̄ (no. 2), a = 12.3281(4) Å, b = 15.8887(5) Å, c = 16.9037(6) Å, α = 89.015(2)°, β = 77.885(3)°, γ = 72.021(3)°, V = 3075.20(19) Å3, Z = 2, Rgt(F) = 0.0658, wRref(F2) = 0.1558, T = 291.2(3) K.

Abstract Background High frequency of recurrence is the major cause of the poor outcomes for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). microRNA (miR)-182-5p emerged as a high-priority miRNA in HCC and was found to be related to HCC metastasis. Whether the expression of miR-182-5p in tumor tissue correlated with early recurrence in HCC patients underwent curative surgery was unknown. Methods Real-time PCR (RT-PCR) and in situ hybridization (ISH) were conducted to assess the expression of miR-182-5p in HCC cells and tissues. Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8), transwell assays were performed to detected cells proliferation and migration ability. Flow cytometry assays were used to detect cell apoptosis rate, and xenograft model was employed to study miR-182-5p in HCC growth and lung metastasis. The target of miR-182-5p was validated with a dual-luciferase reporter assay and western blotting. Immunohistochemistry, immumoblotting, and immunoprecipitation were performed to test relative protein expression. Results We showed that high expression of miR-182-5p in tumor tissues correlated with poor prognosis as well as early recurrence in HCC patients underwent curative surgery. miR-182-5p enhanced motility and invasive ability of HCC cells both in vitro and in vivo. miR-182-5p directly targets 3′-UTR of FOXO3a and repressed FOXO3a expression, activating AKT/FOXO3a pathway to promote HCC proliferation. Notably, miR-182-5p activated Wnt/β-catenin signaling by inhibiting the degradation of β-catenin and enhancing the interaction between β-catenin and TCF4 which was mediated by repressed FOXO3a. Conclusions Consistently, miR-182-5p can be a potential predictor of early recurrence for HCC patients underwent curative surgery, and FOXO3a plays a key mediator in miR-182-5p induced HCC progression.

This paper investigates a novel projection neurodynamic approach for solving the basis pursuit denoising (BPDN) in a distributed manner. First, by using the distributed consensus theorem over undirected graph and supplementary variables method, the distributed version of BPDN is obtained. Second, with the help of projection operators, primal-dual dynamical system and derivative feedback terms, a novel distributed neurodynamic approach is proposed to deal with the distributed version of BPDN for sparse recovery. Moreover, the optimality and convergence properties of the proposed distributed projection neurodynamic approach (DPNA) are analyzed rigorously. Finally, we apply DPNA to sparse signal reconstruction which demonstrates the effectiveness of DPNA through numerical experiments. In addition, inspired by the role of image reconstruction technology in the field of defense against adversarial attack, we use DPNA as a preprocessing method to enhance the robustness of the deep model. Compared with known defense schemes such as JEPG, ComDefend, and OMP, our DPNA is better than them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]