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Colorectal cancer stem cells (CCSCs) are implicated in colorectal tumor initiation, invasion, recurrence and treatment resistance, so elucidation of the mechanism underlying the cancer stem cells induction and development of drugs targeting CCSCs are vital for cancer treatment. Growing evidence shows that dysregulated deubiquitinase (DUBs) expression is frequently associated with stemness and maintenance of cancer stem cells (CSCs). In the current study, we found that upregulation of USP47 is associated with tumorigenesis and poor prognosis in clinical patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). Besides, USP47 was highly expressed in CCSCs enriched by serum-free culture. Further investigation showed that USP47 is closely involved in the maintenance of the stemness of CCSCs. USP47 silencing reduces proliferation and migration of colorectal cancer cells and suppresses the self-renewal of CCSCs by downregulating the expression of cancer stem cell markers, including CD44, CD133, CD166, OCT4 and NANOG. Furthermore, we identified Parthenolide (PTL), a natural sesquiterpene lactone, as a novel USP47 inhibitor. PTL diminishes CCSCs self-renewal and induces apoptosis of CCSCs. Taken together, our findings highlighted a novel DUB involved in the modulation of CCSCs stemness and the potential of PTL in the CRC treatment by targeting CCSCs as the USP47 inhibitor.

Enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2), a key histone methyltransferase and EMT inducer, is overexpressed in diverse carcinomas, including breast cancer. However, the molecular mechanisms of EZH2 dysregulation in cancers are still largely unknown. Here, we discover that EZH2 is asymmetrically dimethylated at R342 (meR342-EZH2) by PRMT1. meR342-EZH2 was found to inhibit the CDK1-mediated phosphorylation of EZH2 at T345 and T487, thereby attenuating EZH2 ubiquitylation mediated by the E3 ligase TRAF6. We also demonstrate that meR342-EZH2 resulted in a decrease in EZH2 target gene expression, but an increase in breast cancer cell EMT, invasion and metastasis. Moreover, we confirm the positive correlations among PRMT1, meR342-EZH2 and EZH2 expression in the breast cancer tissues. Finally, we report that high expression levels of meR342-EZH2 predict a poor clinical outcome in breast cancer patients. Our findings may provide a novel diagnostic target and promising therapeutic target for breast cancer metastasis.

Inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor is an uncommon mesenchymal neoplasm, which can be seen in any anatomic region from the central nervous system to the gastrointestinal tract. Herein, we report the 68Ga-FAPI PET/CT findings in a 49-year-old man with mesenteric inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor.

Objective: To investigate the association between plasma Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) levels and visceral fat area (VFA) among Chinese young men. Subjects and methods: This cross-sectional study involved 156 Chinese male subjects, aged 18–45 years, who visited the First Hospital of Qinhuangdao (Hebei, China) in 2014 for annual health check-up. Participants were categorized into: low (VFA < 75.57 cm2), medium (75.57 cm2 ≤ VFA

Macrophages as components of the innate immune system play a critical role in antitumor responses. Strategies for targeting CD47 are becoming a hot spot for cancer therapy. The expression of CD47 is exercised by macrophages to make a distinction between “self” or “nonself.” Anti-CD47 antibodies block the interaction between macrophage signal regulatory protein-α (SIRPα) and tumor surface CD47. In this study, we report and assess a novel anti-CD47 blocking antibody named 2C8, which exhibits high affinity and tremendous anticancer effects. More concretely, 2C8 significantly induces macrophages, including protumorigenic subtype M2 macrophages killing tumor cells in vitro, and is revealed to be more effective than commercially available anti-CD47 mAb B6H12.2. In vivo, 2C8 controls tumor growth and extends survival of xenograft mice. The antitumor ability of 2C8 might be applicable to many other cancers. The generation of a novel CD47 antibody contributes to consolidating clinical interest in targeting macrophages for the treatment of malignancy and, moreover, as a supplement therapy when patients are resistant or refractory to other checkpoint therapies or relapse after such treatments.

MOOC is a new teaching method that has emerged with the development of Internet information technology. It has realized the platform design with multimedia interactive network as the medium and virtual reality and hypermedia as the real technology theme. We can carry out information dissemination of remote digital satellite video IP multicast technology. This article will analyze the problems existing in the current situation of university computer teaching, and put forward the idea of adding MOOC and rain classroom to university computer basic mixed teaching. The author will put forward reasonable suggestions based on the application of MOOC and Rain Classroom.

Blockchain technology is widely used in the financial field. Blockchain technology can not only effectively change the flaws in the rules of the traditional financial system, but also accelerate the construction and development of a shared and win-win financial ecosystem. However, the blockchain technology itself is an emerging technology, and there are still some hidden risks in the process of application and operation. Therefore, we need to research and analyze the application of blockchain technology in the financial industry, and strengthen the supervision of blockchain technology. At the same time, we also need to explore the specific application of blockchain technology in the financial industry. In this way, we can not only accurately grasp the actual application of blockchain technology, but also promote the development of blockchain technology in the financial industry, thereby ensuring the security of blockchain technology in the application process.

Tea is an important beverage in humans&rsquo, daily lives. For a long time, tea grade identification relied on sensory evaluation, which requires professional knowledge, so is difficult and troublesome for laypersons. Tea chemical component detection usually involves a series of procedures and multiple steps to obtain the final results. As such, a simple, rapid, and reliable method to judge the quality of tea is needed. Here, we propose a quick method that combines ultraviolet (UV) spectra and color difference to classify tea. The operations are simple and do not involve complex pretreatment. Each method requires only a few seconds for sample detection. In this study, famous Chinese green tea, Huangshan Maofeng, was selected. The traditional detection results of tea chemical components could not be used to directly determine tea grade. Then, digital instrument methods, UV spectrometry and colorimetry, were applied. The principal component analysis (PCA) plots of the single and combined signals of these two instruments showed that samples could be arranged according to grade. The combined signal PCA plot performed better with the sample grade descending in clockwise order. For grade prediction, the random forest (RF) model produced a better effect than the support vector machine (SVM) and the SVM + RF model. In the RF model, the training and testing accuracies of the combined signal were all 1. The grades of all samples were correctly predicted. From the above, the UV spectrum combined with color difference can be used to quickly and accurately classify the grade of Huangshan Maofeng tea. This method considerably increases the convenience of tea grade identification.

The present study evaluated the performance of 2 novel adiposity indicators, body shape index (ABSI), and body roundness index (BRI), to determine the accumulation of visceral fat in type 2 diabetic patients. A cross-sectional study was performed on 233 type 2 diabetic patients from Qinhuangdao, China. Visceral fat area (VFA) was measured using bioelectrical impedance. Accumulation of visceral fat was defined as VFA ≥ 100 cm2. In diabetic males, the area under the curve (AUC) values were 0.904 for waist circumference (WC), 0.923 for BRI, and 0.788 for ABSI. In diabetic females, the AUC values were 0.894 for WC, 0.915 for BRI, and 0.668 for ABSI. The AUCs were similar between BRI and WC (P > .05). The AUC for ABSI was lower compared to WC and BRI (P

// Zhongwei Li 1 , Meichen Dong 1 , Dongmei Fan 2 , Pingfu Hou 3 , Hongyuan Li 1 , Lingxia Liu 2 , Cong Lin 2 , Jiwei Liu 1 , Liangping Su 1 , Lan Wu 1 , Xiaoxue Li 2 , Baiqu Huang 2 , Jun Lu 2 and Yu Zhang 1 1 The Key Laboratory of Molecular Epigenetics of Ministry of Education (MOE), Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China 2 The Institute of Genetics and Cytology, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China 3 Jiangsu Center for the Collaboration and Innovation of Cancer Biotherapy, Cancer Institute, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou, China Correspondence to: Yu Zhang, email: zhangy288@nenu.edu.cn Keywords: lncRNA ANCR, TGF-β, EMT, RUNX2, metastasis Received: January 20, 2017 Accepted: May 29, 2017 Published: June 27, 2017 ABSTRACT Epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a progression of cellular plasticity critical for development, differentiation, cancer cells migration and tumor metastasis. As a well-studied factor, TGF-β participates in EMT and involves in physiological and pathological functions of tumor progression. Accumulating evidence indicates that long noncoding RNAs(lncRNAs) play crucial roles in EMT and tumor metastasis. Here, we find that lncRNA ANCR participates in TGF-β1-induced EMT. By our ChIP and Real-time PCR assays, we reveal that TGF-β1 down-regulates ANCR expression by increasing HDAC3 enrichment at ANCR promoter region, which decreases both H3 and H4 acetylation of ANCR promoter. In addition, by western blot and transwell assays, we indicate that ectopic expression of ANCR partly attenuates the TGF-β1-induced EMT. Downstream, ANCR inhibits breast cancer cell migration and breast cancer metastasis by decreasing RUNX2 expression in vitro and in vivo . Thus, our study identifies ANCR, as a new TGF-β downstream molecular, is essential for TGF-β1-induced EMT by decreasing RUNX2 expression. These results implicate that ANCR might become a prognostic biomarker and an anti-metastasis therapy target for breast cancer.

Prenatal clinical detection of thalassemia involves gap‑PCR and reverse dot blot (RDB) analysis of fetal DNA acquired through invasive methods. The present study aimed to develop a non‑invasive prenatal diagnostic method for thalassemia based on next‑generation sequencing (NGS). A total of eight families with proband children with thalassemia were recruited for the study during a subsequent pregnancy. The sequence of the thalassemia genes of the parents and proband were determined using NGS, based on a thalassemia AmpliSeq panel. Cell‑free plasma DNA from pregnant women related to the aforementioned proband was analyzed using an NGS panel, based on thalassemia‑associated capture probes. Heterozygous single nucleotide polymorphisms within the 10 kb regions flanking exons of the targeted thalassemia genes were acquired using probes or AmpliSeq and employed for parental haplotype construction using Trio‑based panel sequencing. The fetal haplotype was deduced from the parental haplotypes and relative haplotype dosage, and subsequently validated using gap‑PCR and RDB, based on invasively sampled amniotic fluid. A non‑invasive prenatal diagnosis procedure from maternal plasma fetal DNA was successfully developed based on haplotype analysis. The deduced haplotypes of eight fetuses were identical to the results of invasive prenatal diagnosis procedures, with an accuracy rate of 100%. Taken together, the present study demonstrated the potential for non‑invasive prenatal diagnosis of α‑ and β‑thalassemia using NGS and haplotype‑assisted analysis.

Summary Background From 2003 to 2005, standardised 5-year cancer survival in China was much lower than in developed countries and varied substantially by geographical area. Monitoring population-level cancer survival is crucial to the understanding of the overall effectiveness of cancer care. We therefore aimed to investigate survival statistics for people with cancer in China between 2003 and 2015. Methods We used population-based data from 17 cancer registries in China. Data for the study population was submitted by the end of July 31, 2016, with follow-up data on vital status obtained on Dec 31, 2015. We used anonymised, individual cancer registration records of patients (aged 0–99 years) diagnosed with primary, invasive cancers from 2003 to 2013. Patients eligible for inclusion had data for demographic characteristics, date of diagnosis, anatomical site, morphology, behaviour code, vital status, and last date of contact. We analysed 5-year relative survival by sex, age, and geographical area, for all cancers combined and 26 different cancer types, between 2003 and 2015. We stratified survival estimates by calendar period (2003–05, 2006–08, 2009–11, and 2012–15). Findings There were 678 842 records of patients with invasive cancer who were diagnosed between 2003 and 2013. Of these records, 659 732 (97·2%) were eligible for inclusion in the final analyses. From 2003–05 to 2012–15, age-standardised 5-year relative survival increased substantially for all cancers combined, for both male and female patients, from 30·9% (95% CI 30·6–31·2) to 40·5% (40·3–40·7). Age-standardised 5-year relative survival also increased for most cancer types, including cancers of the uterus (average change per calendar period 5·5% [95% CI 2·5–8·5]), thyroid (5·4% [3·2–7·6]), cervix (4·5% [2·9–6·2]), and bone (3·2% [2·1–4·4]). In 2012–15, age-standardised 5-year survival for all patients with cancer was higher in urban areas (46·7%, 95% CI 46·5–47·0) than in rural areas (33·6%, 33·3–33·9), except for patients with oesophageal or cervical cancer; but improvements in survival were greater for patients residing in rural areas than in urban areas. Relative survival decreased with increasing age. The increasing trends in survival were consistent with the upward trends of medical expenditure of the country during the period studied. Interpretation There was a marked overall increase in cancer survival from 2003 to 2015 in the population covered by these cancer registries in China, possibly reflecting advances in the quality of cancer care in these areas. The survival gap between urban and rural areas narrowed over time, although geographical differences in cancer survival remained. Insight into these trends will help prioritise areas that need increased cancer care. Funding National Key R&D Program of China, PUMC Youth Fund and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and Major State Basic Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

In the present study, we studied the influence of serum high-molecular weight adiponectin (HMWA) levels in patients with pregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH) on the occurrence of eclampsia in secondary pregnancy and its related mechanisms. In total, 130 patients who were diagnosed with PIH for the first time were selected for this study; the median interval of the secondary pregnancy was 28.5 months. The serum HMWA and leptin levels both times were detected, and the insulin resistance indexes (HOMA-IR) were calculated. The serum inflammatory indexes in the secondary pregnancy included interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) levels, and the oxidative stress indexes included methane dicarboxylic aldehyde (MDA) and oxidized low-density lipoprotein (ox-LDL) levels. The expression levels of adiponectin receptor 2 and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) in placental tissue were detected. In secondary pregnancy, there were a total of 20 cases of eclampsia (15.38%), including 2 cases of mild PIH, 8 cases of moderate PIH and 10 cases of severe PIH; differences were statistically significant when compared to patients without eclampsia (p

Clustering analysis is an unsupervised method to find hidden structures in datasets and has been widely used in various fields. However, it is always difficult for users to understand, evaluate, and explain the clustering results in the spaces with dimension greater than three. Although high-dimensional visualization of clustering technology can express clustering results well, it still has significant limitations. In this paper, a visualization cluster analysis method based on the minimum distance spectrum (MinDS) is proposed, aimed at reducing the problems of clustering multidimensional datasets. First, the concept of MinDS is defined based on the distance between high-dimensional data. MinDS can map any dataset from high-dimensional space to a lower dimension to determine whether the data set is separable. Next, a clustering method which can automatically determine the number of categories is designed based on MinDS. This method is not only able to cluster a dataset with clear boundaries, but can also cluster the dataset with fuzzy boundaries through the edge corrosion strategy based on the energy of each data point. In addition, strategies for removing noise and identifying outliers are designed to clean datasets according to the characteristics of MinDS. The experimental results presented validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed schemes and show that the proposed approach is simple, stable, and efficient, and can achieve multidimensional visualization cluster analysis of complex datasets.

The motivation of students' learning motivation is the focus of the current campus teachers should pay attention to. With the development of computer technology, the introduction of multimedia technology into the daily teaching process has been very popular, and has been widely used. In accordance with their aptitude, based on this platform, to solve the incentive strategy of intelligent decision problems of different students is particularly important. This paper is based on the multimedia technology, multimedia teaching courseware, establish the hierarchical structure analysis, efficiency and stimulate interest in learning, sharing of curriculum resources as a guide in the process of modeling, the multimedia teaching should consider teaching objectives, curriculum characteristics and students' cognitive level characteristics. According to the method of weighted analysis and standardization, the intelligent decision-making system of teacher's incentive strategy is designed to stimulate students' learning motivation.

// Jie Deng 1 , Mengmeng Jia 1 , Xiaolin Cheng 1 , Zhen Yan 1 , Dongmei Fan 1 and Xiaoyu Tian 1 1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, The First Affiliated Hospital, and College of Clinical Medicine of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China Correspondence to: Xiaoyu Tian, email: // Keywords : ABO blood group, ovarian reserve, systematic review, meta-analysis Received : November 30, 2016 Accepted : February 10, 2017 Published : February 27, 2017 Abstract Ovarian reserve reflects a woman's fertility potential. The ABO blood group system is a very stable genetic marker. Although many recent studies have explored the relationship between ABO blood group and ovarian reserve, a consensus has not yet been reached. This paper is the first meta-analysis and systematic review of the relationship between ABO blood type and ovarian reserve. We analyzed seven cross-sectional studies evaluating follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) or anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) levels in 55,113 participants to determine ovarian reserve. This study found no relationship between ABO blood type and ovarian reserve when FSH was used as an indicator of ovarian reserve (A vs non-A:OR=1.03, 95% CI:0.96-1.11; B vs non-B: OR=0.98, 95% CI:0.75-1.29; AB vs non-AB:OR=0.96, 95% CI:0.71-1.30; O vs non-O:OR=1.03, 95%CI:0.74-1.43).There was also no relationship between ABO blood type and ovarian reserve when AMH was used as an indicator (A vs non-A:OR=0.89, 95% CI:0.76-1.03; B vs non-B:OR=1.02, 95% CI:0.80-1.30; AB vs non-AB:OR=1.14, 95% CI:0.80-1.64, O vs non-O:OR=1.07, 95% CI:0.86-1.34). Overall, the current study found no relationship between ABO blood group and ovarian reserve. However, additional rigorous, high-quality and multi-indicator studies with large sample sizes are required for further verification.

// Meng-Meng Jia 1 , Jie Deng 1 , Xiao-lin Cheng 1 , Zhen Yan 1 , Qing-Chun Li 1 , Ying-Ying Xing 1 , Dong-Mei Fan 1 , Xiao-Yu Tian 1 1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, The First Affiliated Hospital, and College of Clinical Medicine of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang 471003, China Correspondence to: Xiao-Yu Tian, email: tianxiaoyu816@163.com Keywords: HE4, tumour marker, ovarian cancer, diagnosis, meta-analysis Received: September 09, 2016 Accepted: November 23, 2016 Published: December 26, 2016 ABSTRACT Urine HE4 has been reported as the potential novel diagnostic biomarker for ovarian cancer in several studies, but their results were inconsistent. Therefore, we conducted a systematic analysis to evaluate the diagnostic value of urine HE4 in detecting ovarian cancer. A comprehensive electronic and manual search was conducted for relevant literatures through several databases up to May 5, 2016. The quality of the studies included in the systematic review was assessed using the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies (QUADAS-2) tool. All analyses were conducted using Meta-DiSc 1.4 and STATA 12.0 software. A total of seven publications were included in this study, and these studies included 413 ovarian cancer patients and 573 controls. The summary estimates were: sensitivity 0.76 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.72–0.80), specificity 0.92 (95% CI: 0.89–0.94), positive likelihood ratio 8.39 (95%CI: 4.81–14.63), negative likelihood ratio 0.23 (95% CI: 0.13–0.39), diagnostic odds ratio 37.90 (95% CI: 18.69–76.83), and area under the curve 0.93. According to our results, urine HE4 has greater diagnostic value in detecting ovarian cancer. In addition, considering the high heterogeneity, further research studies with more well-designed and large sample sizes are needed in the future.

Objective To compare the natural fertility outcomes of salpingotomy and salpingectomy among women treated for tubal pregnancy. Methods An online database search including PubMed, Embase, CENTRAL and Web of Science was performed to identify studies comparing salpingotomy and salpingectomy to treat women with tubal pregnancy. The search included papers published after the databases were established until May 2015. Two reviewers independently screened literature according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria and then extracted data and assessed the methodological quality of all of the included studies. The meta-analysis was conducted using RevMan 5.3 software. The registration number is CRD42015017545 in PROSPERO. Results Two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and eight cohort studies, including a total of 1,229 patients, were znalyzed. The meta-analysis of the RCT subgroup indicated that there was no statistically significant difference in IUP rates (RR = 1.04, 95% CI = 0.89–1.21, P = 0.61) nor the repeat ectopic pregnancy (REP) rate (RR = 1.30, 95% CI = 0.72–2.38, P = 0.39) between the salpingotomy and salpingectomy group. In contrast, the cohort study subgroup analysis revealed that the IUP rate was higher in the salpingotomy group compared with the salpingectomy group (RR = 1.24, 95% CI = 1.08–1.42, P = 0.002); Salpingotomy also increased the risk of REP rate (RR = 2.27, 95% CI = 1.12–4.58, P = 0.02). The persistent ectopic pregnancy (PEP) occurred more frequently in the salpingotomy group than the salpingectomy group (RR = 11.61, 95% CI = 3.17–42.46, P = 0.0002). An IUP would be more likely to occur after salpingotomy than salpingectomy when the follow-up time was more than 36 months (RR = 1.16, 95% CI = 1.02–1.32, P = 0.03). The IUP rate (RR = 1.13, 95% CI = 1.01–1.26, P = 0.03), and the REP rate (RR = 1.62, 95% CI = 1.02–2.56, P = 0.04) was higher after salpingotomy than salpingectomy among patients from Europe compared with those from America. Conclusions Based on the available evidence, we believe that for patients with a healthy contralateral tube operated for tubal pregnancy, the subsequent fertility after salpingectomy and salpingotomy are similar in the long term. The fertility prospects will not be improved via salpingotomy compared with salpingectomy.

Comparative study on the gasification reactivity of the three types of Chinese coal chars with steam and CO2 at 850–1050 °C was conducted by isothermal thermogravimetric analysis. The effects of coal rank, pore structure, ash behavior, and gasification temperature on the gasification reactivity of coal chars were investigated. It is found that the gasification reactivity difference between different coal chars changes with reaction degree and gasification temperature, and has no immediate connection with coal rank and initial pore structure. Ash behavior plays an important role in the char reactivity, and changes with gasification temperature and reaction degree due to the variation in the compositions and relative amount. The influence of pore structure is more noticeable during a relatively moderate reaction process. The relative reactivity ratio of steam to CO2 gasification generally decreases with the increasing temperature, and is related with the catalytic effect of inherent minerals. The characteristic parameters of the chars were analyzed, finding that the value of half reaction specific rate is approximate to the average specific rate under the same conditions. The nth-order distributed activation energy model is proposed to describe the coal char gasification process, and the results show that the activation energy increases with the increasing carbon conversion.

In recent years, robot technology has been rapidly developed and applied to every walk of life. With the promotion and popularization of the robot technology, requirement of using robot is becoming high and the demand of intelligent robots is particularly urgent. Machine vision is an important research direction in the field of intelligent robotics. In the robot vision system, the core problem is the targets extraction, and the image segmentation is the key technique of extracting targets accurately, rapidly and in real-time. Since the environment is complex and the targets are diverse, the amount of images data perceived by robots is large and the images are unpredictable. Thus, it is very important to extract and segment targets accurately. Aimed at the segmentation processing of high-resolution images, a novel clustering algorithm is proposed in this paper. According to the sum of the energy of data and their sizes, it recognizes the clustering representatives and members, and identifies the most probability members by the competition among data points. Then we apply the algorithm by combining the novel clustering algorithm into Mean Shift clustering algorithm in color image segmentation problem. The algorithm can quickly and efficiently achieve the targets segmentation of high-resolution images, and has good segmentation effect. The experiments show that the proposed approach has better clustering quality and is faster than the traditional clustering algorithm.

We examined ABCB5 gene expression using real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in leukemia cells from 29 patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), 24 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), 42 with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), 22 with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), 17 with lymphoma and 10 with multiple myeloma (MM). It was confirmed that expression of the ABCB5 gene is highly increased in B-precursor ALL and French-American-British (FAB) M1 and M2 types of AML and lymphoma. The ABCB5 gene is expressed more highly in patients with relapsed or refractory disease than in patients with drug sensitive acute leukemia. Furthermore, there was an evident positive correlation between ABCB5 mRNA expression and MDR1 mRNA expression, but no correlation with MRP mRNA expression or BCRP mRNA expression. Quantification of the ABCB5 gene by real-time PCR offers particular promise as a prognostic marker and a marker for drug resistance in acute leukemia. Our findings raise the possibility that ABCB5 may be responsible for both the progression and chemotherapeutic refractoriness of advanced acute leukemia, and that ABCB5-targeted approaches might therefore represent novel and translationally relevant therapeutic strategies for drug resistance in leukemia.

The current delivery methods for pain medication, local anesthetics, antibiotics, and steroids present several limitations mainly due to their route of administration, which results in suboptimal pain management, potential systemic toxicity, and subtherapeutic levels which increases the risk of microorganisms developing antibiotic resistance. Our group developed a hybrid material consisting of nanoporous silicon (pSi) and poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanoparticles, loaded with antibiotics and pain relief medications, respectively. The medications were delivered via a bioactive angiogenic gel of platelet-rich plasma (PRP). This system releases both molecules in a sustained and controlled fashion while simultaneously promoting wound healing and vascularization of the surgical site. The resulting advantages include improved medication efficacy at a lower total drug concentration, decreased risk of systemic toxicity, and for antibiotics, decreased risk of developing resistance. The versatile nature of our platform allows for a variety of different drugs, molecules, biological factors to be loaded and released by the gel. Moreover, by tuning the chemical and physical properties of each component, it is possible to tailor the release rate of each biomolecule to its desired therapeutic level. Therapeutic and antimicrobial agents were released at potent daily dosages for up to 7 days by combination of PLGA and pSi particles free or embedded within the PRP gel. When implanted in vivo, the composite gel was vascularized and infiltrated with endogenous cells by 2 weeks while exhibiting no symptoms of inflammation or immune response. This novel technology has the potential to dramatically affect the post-operative management of patients with an immediate improvement in post-operative pain management, decreased PACU and hospital length of stays, with subsequently decreased hospital and surgical costs. Furthermore, this unique and effective drug delivery platform technology may eliminate the need for subsequent treatments, repeat dosing, and dramatically improve patient convenience and patient compliance.

Appendix A. Figures with essential colour discrimination: Certain figures in this article, particularly Figures 1, 3 and 4, are difficult to interpret in black and white. The full colour images can be found in the on-line version, at doi:10.1016/j.actbio.2010. 03.031. The suitability of porous silicon (pSi) encapsulated in microfibers of the biodegradable polymer polycaprolactone (PCL) for ophthalmic applications was evaluated, using both a cell attachment assay with epithelial cells and an in vivo assessment of biocompatibility in rats. Microfibers of PCL containing encapsulated pSi particles at two different concentrations (6 and 20 wt.%) were fabricated as non-woven fabrics. Given the dependence of Si particle dissolution kinetics on pSi surface chemistry, two different types of pSi particles (hydride-terminated and surface-oxidized) were evaluated for each of the two particle concentrations. Significant attachment of a human lens epithelial cell line (SRA 01/04) to all four types of scaffolds within a 24 h period was observed. Implantation of Si fabric samples beneath the conjunctiva of rat eyes for 8 weeks demonstrated that the composite materials did not cause visible infection or inflammation, and did not erode the ocular surface. We suggest that these novel composite materials hold considerable promise as scaffolds in tissue engineering with controlled release applications. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

OBJECTIVE To investigate the influence of O-(4-ethoxyl-butyl)-berbamine (EBB) on the expression of cyclin B1 and cdc2-p34 in the human drug-resistant breast cancer MCF-7/ADR cell line. METHODS The MTT assay was used to assess the cytotoxicity of EBB. Di ff erent levels of EBB were added to different cell lines at series of time points solely or combined with doxorubicin (DOX) to detect the e ff ect on the expression of cyclinB1 and cdc2-p34 by Western blots. cdc2-p34 tyrosine phosphorylation was detected by immunoprecipitation. In addition, apoptosis and cytoplastic Ca2+concentrations were systematically examined by laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM). RESULTS EBB showed little inhibitory activity on human umbilical vein endothelial cells (ECV304), whereas EBB inhibited cell growth (IC50 range, 4.55~15.74 μ mol/L) in a variety of sensitive and drug-resistance cell lines. EBB also down-regulated the expression of cyclin B1 and cdc2-p34 in a concentration and time dependent manner, which was an important reason for the G2/M phase arrest. EBB was shown to induce apoptosis of MCF-7/ADR cells while increasing the level of cytoplastic Ca2+. CONCLUSION The low cytotoxicity of EBB suggests it may be useful as a rational reversal agent. The effect of EBB on cell cycle arrest and related proteins, apoptosis, and cytoplastic Ca2+ concentration may be involved in reversing multidrug resistance.

Background B-acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) is derived from B cell progenitors. Recently, the development of appropriate combinations of chemotherapy and immunotherapy represents a promising approach for eliminating cancer. We previously constructed an anti-CD3 × anti-CD19 bi-specific antibody in a diabody configuration and its disulfide-stabilized format (ds-diabody). The combination of the diabody or ds-diabody and Ara-C was highly effective in enhancing the cytotoxicity of T cells against the CD19+ human leukemia cell-line, Nalm-6, both in vitro and in vivo. This study verified whether B-ALL patient-derived cells were sensitive to the diabody or ds-diabody and low-dosage Ara-C combination. Methods This study aimed to detect the B7 family members B7.1 (CD80) and B7.2 (CD86) that were expressed in B-ALL patient-derived cells pre-treated by Ara-C (0.25 μM) and to determine the targeted killing ability of T cell subtypes induced by the diabody or ds-diabody combination with Ara-C both in vitro and in vivo. We also determined the levels of the cytokines that were released by activated CD4+ or CD8+ T cells during therapy. Result Low-dose Ara-C enhanced CD80 and CD86 expression in nearly 50 % of specimens of B-ALL patient-derived cells. A combination of diabody or ds-diabody and Ara-C enhanced T cell against B-ALL cells in vitro and in vivo. Both CD8+ and CD4+ T cells were potently activated. Expression of CD25 and CD69 was augmented equally by CD4+ or CD8+ T cells. However, CD8+ T cells made the major contribution by redirecting target cell lysis in a granzyme B and perforin-dependent mechanism. CD4+ T cells played an important immunomodulatory role by secreting IL2. Consequently, IL3, IL6, TNFα, and IFNγ were also released by CD4+ or CD8+ T cells following diabody-mediated T cell activation. Conclusion T cell therapy induced by diabody or ds-diabody combined with low dose of Ara-C was effective against cancer cell-lines and in clinical trials. In vivo, the ds-diabody was more efficient than its parent diabody due to its enhanced stability.

Rituximab is widely used in clinical setting for the treatment of B malignant lymphoma and has achieved remarkable success. However, in most patients, the disease ultimately relapses and become resistant to rituximab. To overcome the limitation, there is still a need to find novel strategy for improving therapeutic efficacy.To construct genetically engineered antibody anti-CD19(Fab)-LDM, and verify the anticancer activity targeted toward B-lymphoma.The anticancer activity of anti-CD19(Fab)-LDM in vitro and in vivo was examined. In vitro, the binding activity and internalization of anti-CD19(Fab)-LDP were measured. Using comet assay and apoptosis, the cytotoxicity of energized fusion proteins was observed. From in vivo experiments, targeting of therapeutic effect and anticancer efficacy bythe fusion protein was verified.Data showed that anti-CD19(Fab)-LDM does not only binding the cell surface but is also internalized into the cell. The energized fusion proteins anti-CD19(Fab)-LDM can induce DNA damage. Furthermore, significant in vivo therapeutic efficacy was observed.The present study demonstrated that the genetically engineered antibody anti-CD19(Fab)-LDM exhibited enhanced cytotoxicity compared to LDM alone. One of the most powerful advantages of anti-CD19(Fab)-LDM, however, is that it can be internalized within the cells and carry out cytotoxic effects. Therefore, anti-CD19(Fab)-LDM may be as a useful targeted therapy for B-cell lymphoma.

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP) on the proliferation and invasion of ovarian cancer ES2 cells. The ovarian cancer ES2 cells were transfected with small interfering RNA against GRP. Cell proliferation was assessed using the Trypan blue assay, apoptosis was determined using propidium iodide/fluorescein isothiocyanate and flow cytometry, and the invasion ability was detected using the Transwell assay. The results revealed that the expression of GRP significantly decreased following transfection with GRP-short hairpin RNA. Furthermore, the silencing of GRP resulted in increased apoptosis and a reduced invasive ability of the ES2 cells. It was concluded that GRP may regulate the proliferation and migration of human ovarian cancer cells, which indicates that GRP may be a potential novel target for the treatment of ovarian cancer.

This study incorporates proactive flexibility and reactive flexibility into the framework of strategic flexibility, and subdivides environmental uncertainty into environmental change rate and environmental change unpredictability. Based on the incorporation and subdivision, it explores the effect of proactive and reactive strategic flexibility on the performance of enterprises and the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty through an analysis of 180 manufacturers. The results show that both proactive and reactive strategic flexibility have positive effects on enterprise performance, the moderating effect of environmental change rate on the relationship between reactive strategic flexibility and enterprise performance turns out insignificant, and that of environmental change unpredictability on the relationship does not exist. The conclusion not only supplements strategic flexibility theory but provides reference for enterprise strategy practice as well.

In this paper, methods of feature selection used in the spam filtering are studied, including CHI square (CHI), Expected Cross Entropy (ECE), the Weight of Evidence for Text (WET) and Information Gain (IG) and a novel modified CHI feature selection method is proposed in spam filtering. The spam filter combined Support Vector Machine (SVM) is selected to evaluate the CHI square, Expected Cross Entropy, the Weight of Evidence for Text, Information Gain and modified CHI. The experiment proved that the modified CHI could improve the precision, recall and F test measure of spam filter and the modified CHI feature selection method is effective.

The problem of ambiguous word sense poses lots of difficulties for language automatic understanding. And the research of word sense discrimination is applied to the resolution of this problem. Statistics are booming in researching this problem. While due to limitation of the scale of training corpus, the method of Statistical word sense discrimination can not attain satisfying results yet. Therefore, under condition that only limit scale corpus is available, how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of statistical learning method is a hotspot in supervised word sense recognition research. On the basis of the concept of word sense Category, a new word sense discrimination method using word sense Category Extending is proposed. Experiment results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of word sense discrimination as the training corpus is not enlarged..

This paper presents a new approach based on Vicarious Words (VWs) to resolve Word Sense Discrimination (WSD) in Chinese language. VWs are particular artificial ambiguous words, which can be used to realize unsupervised WSD. A Bayesian classifier is implemented to test the efficacy of the VW solution on Senseval-3 Chinese test suite. The performance is better than state-of-the-art results with an average F-measure of 0.80. The experiment verifies the value of VW for unsupervised method in WSD.

A new method for digital modulation recognition in shortwave communications based on wavelet packet and cumulants is presented. It uses wavelet packet transform and cumulants as feature extraction method and hierarchical classifiers based on support vector machines as the classifier. This hierarchical method has higher recognize rate compared with other methods. Classification results for 10 modulation types including FSK, PSK etc. show that the method has encouraging recognition performance in low SNR.

This paper presents the concept of vicarious words and develops a new unsupervised Chinese word sense disambiguation method. This method, after statistical learning from the vicarious words, realizes unsupervised word sense disambiguation by calculating mutual information to measure the degree of collocation information between the ambiguous words and their context. In our experiment, we test ten real ambiguous words and get the highest accuracy of 97%. The mean accuracy was 88.52%. The experimental results have proved the feasibility of this method.

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is usually considered to be a pattern classification to research and it has always being a key problem and one of difficult points in natural language processing. Statistical learning theory is a mainstream of the research method for WSD. The distribution of the word-senses of an ambiguous word is always not symmetrical and the distinction between word-senses' emergence frequency is great sometimes, so the judgment results are inclined to the maximum probability word-sense in the word-sense classification. The reflection of this phenomenon is obviously in the Bayesian model. When using the Bayesian model to carry on some research we find a new word-sense decision rule, which have a better precision than Bayesian model in WSD. In order to validate the credibility and stabilization of this method we carry through the experiment time and again, and acquire lots of experiment data. The results of the experiment indicate that new decision rule is more excellent than Bayesian decision rule. Furthermore this paper provides a theoretical foundation for this new decision rule.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) has always being a key problem and one of difficult points in natural language processing. WSD is usually considered to be a pattern classification to be research. Feature selection is an important sector of WSD process. We review naive Bayes model (NBM) seriously, and the feature selection method adopted in this paper is directed at Bayesian Assumption to improve NBM. Positional information concealed in the context of ambiguous word is mined via information gain calculation, to increase the knowledge acquisition efficiency of Bayesian model and to improve the effect of word-sense classification. Eight ambiguous words are tested in our experiment; the experimental results of improved Bayesian model are higher 3.5 per cent than the ones of NBM. The accuracy rise is bigger and the improvement effect is outstanding; and these results prove also the method put forward in this paper is efficacious.