The effect of elemene on lung adenocarcinoma A549 cell radiosensitivity and elucidation of its mechanism

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of elemene on the radiosensitivity of A549 cells and its possible molecular mechanism. METHODS: Apoptosis of A549 cells was detected by flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy. The effect of double-strand break (DSB) damage repair in A549 cells was evaluated using the neutral comet assay. Protein expression levels were detected using western blotting, and the correlation between protein levels was analyzed. RESULTS: Elemene exhibited a radiosensitizing effect on A549 cells. The level of apoptosis induced by elemene combined with radiation was significantly greater (

Clinical implications of metastatic lymph node ratio in gastric cancer

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The 5-year survival rate in patients with gastric cancer is still poor, and lymph node metastasis is considered one of the most important prognostic factors. However, there are controversies in the classification of lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer. This study was carried out to investigate whether the metastatic lymph node ratio is a reliable classification of lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer in Chinese.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>224 cases with gastric cancer with more than D1 dissection were retrospectively reviewed. The association between the total number of resected lymph nodes and the number of metastatic lymph nodes was determined. The prognostic value of the metastastic node ratio, defined as the ratio of the number of metastatic lymph nodes over the total number of resected lymph nodes, and the pN classification was assessed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The number of metastatic lymph node increased with the number of total resected lymph nodes. A Cox regression revealed that the metastatic node ratio, the number of metastatic nodes, histological type, and histological growth pattern independently influenced prognosis. The 5-year survival rates were 78%, 61%, 25%, 0% in cases with a metastastic node ratio of 0%, > 0% but < 40%, 40–80%, > 80%, respectively (<it>P </it>< 0.001), and were 78%, 62%, 38%, 0% in cases with gastric cancer histologically classified as pN0, pN1, pN2, pN3, respectively (<it>P </it>< 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The metastatic lymph node ratio is a simple and useful independent prognostic factor. It may obviate possible confounding factors that are related to stage migration, and should be considered as an important component in the lymph node category.</p

Establishment and Verification of a Bagged-Trees-Based Model for Prediction of Sentinel Lymph Node Metastasis for Early Breast Cancer Patients

Purpose: Lymph node metastasis is a multifactorial event. Several scholars have developed nomograph models to predict the sentinel lymph nodes (SLN) metastasis before operation. According to the clinical and pathological characteristics of breast cancer patients, we use the new method to establish a more comprehensive model and add some new factors which have never been analyzed in the world and explored the prospect of its clinical application.Materials and methods: The clinicopathological data of 633 patients with breast cancer who underwent SLN examination from January 2011 to December 2014 were retrospectively analyzed. Because of the imbalance in data, we used smote algorithm to oversample the data to increase the balanced amount of data. Our study for the first time included the shape of the tumor and breast gland content. The location of the tumor was analyzed by the vector combining quadrant method, at the same time we use the method of simply using quadrant or vector for comparing. We also compared the predictive ability of building models through logistic regression and Bagged-Tree algorithm. The Bagged-Tree algorithm was used to categorize samples. The SMOTE-Bagged Tree algorithm and 5-fold cross-validation was used to established the prediction model. The clinical application value of the model in early breast cancer patients was evaluated by confusion matrix and the area under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC).Results: Our predictive model included 12 variables as follows: age, body mass index (BMI), quadrant, clock direction, the distance of tumor from the nipple, morphology of tumor molybdenum target, glandular content, tumor size, ER, PR, HER2, and Ki-67.Finally, our model obtained the AUC value of 0.801 and the accuracy of 70.3%.We used logistic regression to established the model, in the modeling and validation groups, the area under the curve (AUC) were 0.660 and 0.580.We used the vector combining quadrant method to analyze the original location of the tumor, which is more precise than simply using vector or quadrant (AUC 0.801 vs. 0.791 vs. 0.701, Accuracy 70.3 vs. 70.3 vs. 63.6%).Conclusions: Our model is more reliable and stable to assist doctors predict the SLN metastasis in breast cancer patients before operation

A multicentre single arm phase 2 trial of neoadjuvant pyrotinib and letrozole plus dalpiciclib for triple-positive breast cancer.

peer reviewedCurrent therapies for HER2-positive breast cancer have limited efficacy in patients with triple-positive breast cancer (TPBC). We conduct a multi-center single-arm phase 2 trial to test the efficacy and safety of an oral neoadjuvant therapy with pyrotinib, letrozole and dalpiciclib (a CDK4/6 inhibitor) in patients with treatment-naïve, stage II-III TPBC with a Karnofsky score of ≥70 (NCT04486911). The primary endpoint is the proportion of patients with pathological complete response (pCR) in the breast and axilla. The secondary endpoints include residual cancer burden (RCB)-0 or RCB-I, objective response rate (ORR), breast pCR (bpCR), safety and changes in molecular targets (Ki67) from baseline to surgery. Following 5 cycles of 4-week treatment, the results meet the primary endpoint with a pCR rate of 30.4% (24 of 79; 95% confidence interval (CI), 21.3-41.3). RCB-0/I is 55.7% (95% CI, 44.7-66.1). ORR is 87.4%, (95% CI, 78.1-93.2) and bpCR is 35.4% (95% CI, 25.8-46.5). The mean Ki67 expression reduces from 40.4% at baseline to 17.9% (P < 0.001) at time of surgery. The most frequent grade 3 or 4 adverse events are neutropenia, leukopenia, and diarrhoea. There is no serious adverse event- or treatment-related death. This fully oral, chemotherapy-free, triplet combined therapy has the potential to be an alternative neoadjuvant regimen for patients with TPBC

Hybrid method for fast Monte Carlo simulation of diffuse reflectance from a multilayered tissue model with tumor-like heterogeneities

We present a hybrid method that combines a multilayered scaling method and a perturbation method to speed up the Monte Carlo simulation of diffuse reflectance from a multilayered tissue model with finite-size tumor-like heterogeneities. The proposed method consists of two steps. In the first step, a set of photon trajectory information generated from a baseline Monte Carlo simulation is utilized to scale the exit weight and exit distance of survival photons for the multilayered tissue model. In the second step, another set of photon trajectory information, including the locations of all collision events from the baseline simulation and the scaling result obtained from the first step, is employed by the perturbation Monte Carlo method to estimate diffuse reflectance from the multilayered tissue model with tumor-like heterogeneities. Our method is demonstrated to shorten simulation time by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, this hybrid method works for a larger range of probe configurations and tumor models than the scaling method or the perturbation method alone.Published versio

Numerical investigation of lens based setup for depth sensitive diffuse reflectance measurements in an epithelial cancer model

Lens based setups have been explored for non-contact diffuse reflectance measurements to reduce the uncertainty due to inconsistent probe-sample pressure in the past years. However, there have been no reports describing the details of Monte Carlo modeling of lens based non-contact setup for depth sensitive diffuse reflectance measurements to the best of our knowledge. In this study, we first presented a flexible Monte Carlo method to model non-contact diffuse reflectance measurements in a lens based setup. Then this method was used to simulate diffuse reflectance measurements from a squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) tissue model in the cone shell, cone and hybrid configurations, in which the cone shell configuration has not been previously proposed in optical spectroscopy. Depth sensitive measurements were achieved by adjusting the following two parameters: (1) the depth of focal point of the imaging lens in the SCC model; and (2) the cone radius in the cone configuration or the ring radius in the cone shell configuration. It was demonstrated that the cone shell and the hybrid configurations in general have better depth sensitivity to the tumor and the stroma than the more commonly used cone configuration for diffuse reflectance measurements in the SCC model.Published versio