The use of immunotherapy has achieved great advances in the treatment of cancer. Macrophages play a pivotal role in the immune defense system, serving both as phagocytes (removal of pathogens and ...cancer cells) and as antigen‐presenting cells (activation of T cells). However, research regarding tumor immunotherapy is mainly focused on the adaptive immune system. The usefulness of innate immune cells (eg, macrophages) in the treatment of cancer has not been extensively investigated. Recent advances in synthetic biology and the increasing understanding of the cluster of differentiation 47/signal regulatory protein alpha (CD47/SIRPɑ) axis may provide new opportunities for the clinical application of engineered macrophages. The CD47/SIRPɑ axis is a major known pathway, repressing phagocytosis and activation of macrophages. In this article, we summarize the currently available evidence regarding the CD47/SIRPɑ axis, and immunotherapies based on blockage. In addition, we propose cell therapy strategies based on macrophage engineering.
The immunotherapy has achieved great progress in cancer treatment. In the article, we review current knowledge about cluster of differentiation 47/signal regulatory protein alpha (CD47/SIRPɑ) pathway and immunotherapies based on blocking CD47/SIRPɑ axis, and we also propose a cell therapy strategy to engineer macrophage to attack cancer cells in the future
•A gradient micropattern of different stripe width was prepared.•The width of micropattern stripes showed obvious effect on hMSCs orientation and differentiation.•Narrow stripes allowed hMSCs to ...spread along the stripes and limited spreading in perpendicular direction.•Cells cultured on the narrow stripes showed a significantly higher expression of VSMC marker protein.
In recent years, various approaches have been taken to generate functional muscle tissue by tissue engineering. However, in vitro methods to generate smooth muscle with physiologically aligned structure remains limited. In order to mimic the in vivo highly organized structure of smooth muscle cells, we used micropatterning technology for engineering parallel aligned cells. In this study, a gradient micropattern of different width of cell-adhesive polystyrene stripes (5, 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 200, 400, 600, 800 and 1000μm) was prepared and the effects of micropattern width on human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) orientation, morphology and smooth muscle cell differentiation were investigated. The width of micropattern stripes showed obvious effect on cell orientation, morphology and smooth muscle cell differentiation. The cells showed higher degree of orientation when the micropattern stripes became narrower. Higher expression of calponin and smooth muscle actin was observed among the narrow micropatterns ranging from 200μm to 20μm, compared to the non-patterned area and wide micropattern areas which showed similar levels of expression.
Childhood unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death and disability for children. Despite the risk factors that lead to the occurrence of injuries have been identified, the relationship ...between cumulative effect of risk/protective factors and unintentional injuries is unclear. The aim of this study was to explore the cumulative effect of risk factors as well as protective factors and their interaction on unintentional injury to rural children.
We used a nested case-control study design from a cohort database. The study comprised 1696 children aged 6 to 14 years. Among them, 424 were cases with unintentional injury and 1272 were their matched control. After controlling for the significant sociodemographic variables, linear and logistic regression analyses were performed.
The risk of unintentional injury increased with the increasing number of risk factors - RFI from 1 to 3 (OR
= 0.978, 95% CI 0.739-1.296), (OR
= 1.720, 95% CI 1.233-2.397), (OR
= 5.162, 95% CI 3.129-8.517). PFI (1) was associated with lower risk of injury, but this association was at the edge of significance (p = 0.052). The increased risk in those with PFI (2) was not significant (p = 0.254). The severity of the unintentional injury significantly increased with the increasing number of the risk factors (p < 0.01), and significantly decreased with both the increasing number of protective factors (p = 0.001) and interaction of the risk and protective factors (p < 0.01).The interaction of RFI and PFI could explain 32.2% of the unintentional injury severity.
According to the findings of the present study, cumulative risk factors and protective factors, as well as their interaction were associated with the occurrence and/ or severity of unintentional injury in children.
Iron element is one of the main impurities in wet-process phosphoric acid and it has a significant impact on the subsequent phosphorus chemical products. This paper studied the feasibility of using ...Sinco-430 cation exchange resin for iron removal from phosphoric acid. The specific surface area and the total exchange capacity of resin were 8.91 m2·g−1 and 5.18 mmol·g−1, respectively. The sorption mechanism was determined by FTIR and XPS and the results indicated that iron was combined with SO3H in resin. The removal process was studied as a function of temperature, H3PO4 content and mass ratio between resin and solution. The unit mass of resin to remove iron was 0.058 g·g−1 resin when the operating parameters were T = 50 °C, H3PO4 content = 27.61 wt% and S/L = 0.1, respectively. Kinetics study demonstrated that pseudo-second-order reaction model fits this study best and the calculated activation energy of overall reaction is 29.10 kJ·mol−1. The overall reaction process was mainly controlled by pore diffusion.
A novel sifting method based on the concept of local integral mean of a signal is developed for empirical mode decomposition (EMD), aiming at decomposing those modes whose frequencies are within an ...octave. Instead of averaging the upper and lower envelopes, the proposed technique computes the local mean curve of a signal by interpolating data points that are local integral averages over segments between successive extrema of the signal. With the sifting method, EMD can separate intrinsic modes of oscillations with frequency ratios up to 0.8, thus considerably improving the frequency resolving power. Also, it is shown that the integral property of the sifting considerably accelerates the convergence of the sifting iteration and remarkably enhances the robustness of EMD against noise disturbance.
Our group previously examined 8 min photobiomodulation (PBM) by 1064 nm laser on the human forearm in vivo to determine its significant effects on vascular hemodynamics and cytochrome c oxidase redox ...activity. Since PBM uses a wide array of wavelengths, in this paper, we investigated (i) whether different wavelengths of lasers induced different PBM effects, and (ii) if a light-emitting diode (LED) at a similar wavelength to a laser could induce similar PBM effects. A broadband near-infrared spectroscopy (bbNIRS) system was utilized to assess concentration changes in oxygenated hemoglobin (ΔHbO) and oxidized cytochrome c oxidase (ΔoxCCO) during and after PBM with lasers at 800 nm, 850 nm, and 1064 nm, as well as a LED at 810 nm. Two groups of 10 healthy participants were measured before, during, and after active and sham PBM on their forearms. All results were tested for significance using repeated measures ANOVA. Our results showed that (i) lasers at all three wavelengths enabled significant increases in ΔHbO and ΔoxCCO of the human forearm while the 1064 nm laser sustained the increases longer, and that (ii) the 810-nm LED with a moderate irradiance (≈135 mW/cm
) induced measurable and significant rises in ΔHbO and ΔoxCCO with respect to the sham stimulation on the human forearm.
Management of the rice brown planthopper
Stål is challenging because it can rapidly adapt to new pesticides within several generations. Combined use of chemical insecticides and antimicrobials was ...proposed as an alternative strategy to control
. Our previous experiments identified two effective agents (chemical insecticide: pymetrozine and antimicrobial: zhongshengmycin) that act on different targets in
. However, conditions and effectiveness of combinations of antimicrobials and insecticides against
are still unknown. Here, we evaluated separate and combined effects of pymetrozine and zhongshengmycin on third instar nymphs of
under laboratory and greenhouse conditions. Results showed that zhongshengmycin exerts significant inhibitory effects on the three endosymbionts
,
, and
cultured
of
. Combinations of pymetrozine and zhongshengmycin under laboratory conditions produced additive or synergistic effects on
and caused higher mortality in third instar nymphs than either of them used alone. Experiments under greenhouse conditions further demonstrated that effective component quality ratio of pymetrozine to zhongshengmycin of 1:10 and 1:40 with co-toxicity coefficients of 221.63 and 672.87, respectively, also produced significant synergistic effects against
. Our results indicated that chemical insecticides combined with antimicrobials may provide a potential novel strategy for controlling
by inhibiting its endosymbionts.
Selective synthesis of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is highly desirable for various applications. Among the strategies proposed for achieving this, the method involving sulfur-containing ...compounds is a promising approach showing the conversion of common cobalt/silica catalysts (Co/SiO2) into chirality selective catalysts. However, the possible influence of sulfur-containing compounds in promoting the selectivity of non-cobalt-based metal/silica catalysts has not been studied. Here three metal sulfate based catalysts (MSO4/SiO2, M=Fe, Ni, or Co) were prepared for SWCNT synthesis under the same growth condition. Detailed SWCNT and catalyst characterizations show that well-dispersed Fe oxides and silicates are formed on Fe2(SO4)3/SiO2, favoring the formation of small diameter (6,5) nanotubes. NiSO4/SiO2 contains a portion of NiSO4 together with Ni silicate and relatively large NiO particles, leading to a wider diameter distribution centered around (8,7) nanotubes. CoSO4/SiO2 consists of dominantly well-dispersed CoSO4 and a small amount of Co silicates, showing the good selectivity toward the relatively larger diameter (9,8) nanotubes with an abundance of 40.6% among the semiconducting nanotubes. Sulfur retained on the catalysts influences the selectivity toward relatively larger diameter SWCNTs. Current work highlights the potential of using metal sulfates with varied decomposition temperatures to achieve the selective growth of SWCNTs.
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There is a critical need for development of real time physiological biomarkers for birth asphyxia that constitutes a major global public health burden. Our recent study (Scientific Reports, V10:9183, ...2020) established a novel non-invasive neurovascular coupling (NVC) assessment in newborns using dynamic wavelet transform coherence (WTC) analysis irrespective of different aEEG algorithms. As an extended study, the current paper examines whether the variability in processed EEG and amplitude-EEG (aEEG) outputs would impact the determination of NVC in newborns with encephalopathy. Concurrent processed EEG tracings and regional near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)-based cerebral tissue oxygen saturation (SctO2) readings during a period of twenty hours in their first day of life were selected and processed in this study. After bandpass-filtered in 2-15 Hz, rectified, and down-sampled at 0.21 Hz, the processed EEG tracings along with NIRS-SctO2 (0.21 Hz) were used to perform WTC analysis, followed by comparison of WTC-metrics between SctO2-processed EEG coherence and SctO2-aEEG coherence using Bland-Altman statistics. Our results demonstrated high and significant correlation (R2 = 0.96, p < 0.001) between NVC assessments by SctO2-processed EEG and SctO2-aEEG coherence, confirming that band-passed, rectified, and down-sampled processed EEG, or aEEG, can be paired with NIRS-SctO2 to assess NVC in newborns with encephalopathy. Findings indicate the feasibility of a simpler approach to NVC in neonates by using directly processed EEG, instead of aEEG.
Triptolide (TP) is a potential drug candidate for the treatment of cancer, but its use was hampered by its systemic toxicity and poor water solubility. Hence, a TP-CSO prodrug was synthesized by ...conjugating TP to chitosan oligosaccharide (CSO), and characterized by
H NMR, FTIR, DSC and XRD analyses. The TP-CSO containing about 4 wt% of TP exhibited excellent water solubility (15 mg/mL) compared to TP (0.017 mg/mL). Compared with TP, the pharmacokinetics of the conjugate after oral administration showed a three-fold increase in the half-life in the blood circulation and a 3.2-fold increase in AUC
. The orally administered TP-CSO could more effectively inhibit tumor progression but with much lower systemic toxicity compared with TP, indicating significant potential for further clinical trials. In conclusion, CSO-based conjugate systems may be useful as a platform for the oral delivery of other sparingly soluble drugs.
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