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The mechanisms by which hypoxic tumours evade immunological pressure and anti-tumour immunity remain elusive. Here, we report that two hypoxia-responsive microRNAs, miR-25 and miR-93, are important for establishing an immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment by downregulating expression of the DNA sensor cGAS. Mechanistically, miR-25/93 targets NCOA3, an epigenetic factor that maintains basal levels of cGAS expression, leading to repression of cGAS during hypoxia. This allows hypoxic tumour cells to escape immunological responses induced by damage-associated molecular pattern molecules, specifically the release of mitochondrial DNA. Moreover, restoring cGAS expression results in an anti-tumour immune response. Clinically, decreased levels of cGAS are associated with poor prognosis for patients with breast cancer harbouring high levels of miR-25/93. Together, these data suggest that inactivation of the cGAS pathway plays a critical role in tumour progression, and reveal a direct link between hypoxia-responsive miRNAs and adaptive immune responses to the hypoxic tumour microenvironment, thus unveiling potential new therapeutic strategies.

Single image dehazing has become an important vision task for prevailing image degradation caused by detrimental atmosphere transmission conditions. Attention mechanism has been widely utilized in learning based methods to assist the model to discard redundant information and hence boost the performance. However, existing methods are mainly dealing with either channel-wise or pixel-wise attention, which requires much more parameters when the size of feature maps increases. In this paper, we introduce the operation-wise attention in the proposed Feedback Operation-Attention Network (FOANet) to focus on attaining optimal combination of network operations for image dehazing. Specifically, our model consists of two main steps. First, the extracted features of hazy input image are fed to the novel operation-attention block which can adjust the weight of different operations dynamically to produce the optimal processed features. The operation space of an operation-attention block comprises vanilla and dilated convolutions with different kernel sizes along with max pooling and average pooling. Second, we adopt curriculum learning with feedback mechanism to continually refine the features in a recurrent fashion and generate the haze-free image. The experimental results on both synthetic and realistic subsets of RESIDE dataset have demonstrated our method can perform dehazing favorably against other dehazing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between air pollution and infant mortality has been inconsistently reported. A few studies have estimated short-term effects of air pollution on infants' health. This population-based case–control study aimed to examine the potential effects of air pollution on sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in the post-neonatal period in Taiwan during 1997–2002. Each case of infant death was matched with 20 randomly selected sex-matched controls who were born on the same day and were still alive. We obtained 24-h measurements of air pollutants and meteorological factors in each case and control with 1- to 14-day lags from 55 air-quality monitoring stations. After controlling for potential confounders, conditional logistic regression analysis was performed to estimate effects of air pollutants on SIDS (n = 398) and respiratory death (n = 121) among neonates. In single- and multi-pollutant models, we found that 100-ppb increment in carbon monoxide (Odds Ratio = 1.04–1.07) and 10-ppb increment in nitrogen dioxide (Odds Ratio = 1.20–1.35) with 1- to 14-day lags were associated with significant increase in SIDS, although a significant relationship between air pollution and respiratory death was not determined in 1- to 14-day lags. Short-term carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide exposure were associated with significant increase in SIDS in the post-neonatal period, with latency estimated within days before death. • Use population-based case–control methodology to examine the acute effects of air pollution on the SIDS. • Positive association between CO, NO 2 exposure and SIDS. • Traffic air pollution may play a key factor to SIDS with a latency of days before death. • Negative finding between respiratory death and air pollutant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]