Enhancing immune effects of a DNA vaccine against kidney cancer using CD40L as an adjuvant

The use of specific combinations of antigens and adjuvant represents a promising approach for increasing the immunogenicity of DNA vaccines. In the present study, we evaluated the immunity and antitumor effects of DNA vaccines with G250 as the target antigen in a mouse model of renal cell carcinoma. We constructed two recombinant plasmids, pVAX1-G250 and pVAX1-CD40L. The recombinant plasmids were injected into mice by intramuscular injection and electrical pulse stimulation. ELISA and ELISPOT experiments were performed to evaluate the corresponding humoral and cellular immune responses following immunization. To further investigate the antitumor potential of the DNA vaccines, we established a tumor-bearing mouse model expressing G250 target antigen. Our results showed that immunization with the combination of the two plasmids exerted the strongest anti-tumor effects. Therefore, our findings demonstrated the effectiveness of CD40L as an adjuvant for DNA vaccines and highlighted the promising use of these vaccines for the treatment of tumors

In Situ Malignant Transformation and Progenitor-Mediated Cell Budding: Two Different Pathways for Breast Ductal and Lobular Tumor Invasion

The human breast lobular and ductal structures and the derived tumors from these structures differ substantial in their morphology, microenvironment, biological presentation, functions, and clinical prognosis. Based on these differences, we have proposed that pre-invasive lobular tumors may progress to invasive lesions through “in situ malignant transformation”, in which the entire myoepithelial cell layer within a given lobule or lobular clusters undergoes extensive degeneration and disruptions, which allows the entire epithelial cell population associated with these myoepithelial cell layers directly invade the stroma or vascular structures. In contrast, pre-invasive ductal tumors may invade the stroma or vascular structures through “progenitor-mediated cell budding”, in which focal myoepithelial cell degeneration-induced aberrant leukocyte infiltration causes focal disruptions in the tumor capsules, which selectively favor monoclonal proliferation of the overlying tumor stem cells or a biologically more aggressive cell clone. Our current study attempted to provide more direct morphological and immunohistochemical data that are consistent with our hypotheses

RSpell: Retrieval-augmented Framework for Domain Adaptive Chinese Spelling Check

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) refers to the detection and correction of spelling errors in Chinese texts. In practical application scenarios, it is important to make CSC models have the ability to correct errors across different domains. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-augmented spelling check framework called RSpell, which searches corresponding domain terms and incorporates them into CSC models. Specifically, we employ pinyin fuzzy matching to search for terms, which are combined with the input and fed into the CSC model. Then, we introduce an adaptive process control mechanism to dynamically adjust the impact of external knowledge on the model. Additionally, we develop an iterative strategy for the RSpell framework to enhance reasoning capabilities. We conducted experiments on CSC datasets in three domains: law, medicine, and official document writing. The results demonstrate that RSpell achieves state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuning scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of the retrieval-augmented CSC framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/47777777/Rspell

Routing in intermittently connected sensor networks

Abstract—To prolong the lifetime of sensor networks, various scheduling schemes have been designed to reduce the number of active sensors. However, some scheduling strategies, such as partial coverage scheduling and target coverage scheduling, may result in disconnected network topologies, due to the low density of the active nodes. In such cases, traditional routing algorithms cannot be applied, and the shortest path discovered by these algorithms may not have the minimum packet delivery latency. In this paper, we address the problem of finding minimum latency routes in intermittently connected sensor networks by proposing an on-demand minimum latency (ODML) routing algorithm. Since on-demand routing algorithm does not work well when the source and destination frequently communicate with each other, we propose two proactive minimum latency routing algo-rithms: optimal-PML and quick-PML. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that (1) ODML can effectively identify minimum latency routes which have much smaller latency than the shortest path, and (2) optimal-PML can minimize the routing message overhead and quick-PML can significantly reduce the route acquisition delay. I

Expression and clinical significance of interleukin-6 pathway in cholangiocarcinoma

BackgroundCholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is a typical inflammation-induced malignancy, and elevated serum interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels have been reported to be linked to the onset and progression of CCA. We aim to investigate the potential prognostic value of the IL-6 pathway for CCA.MethodsWe detected the expressions of IL-6, IL-6R, glycoprotein (gp130), C-reactive protein (CRP), Janus kinase 2 (JAK2), and signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) in CCA tissue microarray using multiplex immunofluorescence. Furthermore, the clinical associations and prognostic values were assessed. Finally, single-cell transcriptome analysis was performed to evaluate the expression level of IL-6 pathway genes in CCA.ResultsThe results revealed that the expression of IL-6 was lower, while the expression of STAT3 was higher in tumor tissues compared to normal tissues. Especially in tumor microenvironment, the expression of IL-6 pathway genes was generally downregulated. Importantly, gp130 was strongly correlated with JAK2 in tumor tissues, while it was moderately correlated with JAK2 in normal tissue. Although none of the gene expressions were directly associated with overall survival and disease-free survival, our study found that IL-6, IL-6R, CRP, gp130, and JAK2 were inversely correlated with vascular invasion, which is a risk factor for poor prognosis in patients with CCA.ConclusionThe findings from this study suggest that the IL-6 signaling pathway may have a potential prognostic value for CCA. Further investigation is needed to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of the IL-6 pathway in CCA

Modelling and optimisation on scroll expander for waste heat recovery organic Rankine cycle

Scroll expander has demonstrated high efficiency at low power range. In this paper, a generic model of a scroll expander has been developed. It can calculate the ideal expander parameters to give the optimal efficiency and prevent under- or over-expansion at any given operating conditions or fluids. The dynamic model was validated by predicting the ideal volumetric expansion ratio with ideal expansion ratio of 4.03 at 0.7 MPa pressure, and showed agreement with experimental data. The results suggested that the rate of scroll increase K in the geometric model has little effect on volumetric expansion ratio or ideal scroll length of the expander, but when expansion ratio is kept constant, lower K value results in lower leakage losses