Design of aluminum nitride metalens for broadband ultraviolet incidence routing

Ultraviolet (UV) photonics-based device and equipment have various applications in sterilization, military covert communication, medical treatment, nanofabrication, gem identification and so on. The traditional constituent UV components are bulky, inefficient, expensive and easily aging under UV radiation. An all-dielectric metasurface offers a promising way to control the amplitude, polarization and phase of light by engineering the size, shape and distribution of its constituent elements. However, UV components based on all-dielectric metasurfaces are difficult to be realized, due to significant absorption loss for most dielectric materials at the UV region. Here we demonstrate the design of a UV metalens, composed of high-aspect-ratio aluminum nitride nanorods. The in-plane on-axis, off-axis and out-of-plane focusing characteristics have been investigated at representative UVA (375 nm), UVB (308 nm) and UVC (244 nm) wavelengths, respectively. Furthermore, we design UV router for mono-wavelength and multiple wavelengths, that is, guiding UV light to designated different spatial positions. Our work is promising for the development of UV photonic devices and would facilitate the integration and miniaturization of the UV nanophotonics

Systematic Assessment of Transcriptomic Biomarkers for Immune Checkpoint Blockade Response in Cancer Immunotherapy

Background: Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy has yielded successful clinical responses in treatment of a minority of patients in certain cancer types. Substantial efforts were made to establish biomarkers for predicting responsiveness to ICB. However, the systematic assessment of these ICB response biomarkers remains insufficient. Methods: We collected 22 transcriptome-based biomarkers for ICB response and constructed multiple benchmark datasets to evaluate the associations with clinical response, predictive performance, and clinical efficacy of them in pre-treatment patients with distinct ICB agents in diverse cancers. Results: Overall, “Immune-checkpoint molecule” biomarkers PD-L1, PD-L2, CTLA-4 and IMPRES and the “Effector molecule” biomarker CYT showed significant associations with ICB response and clinical outcomes. These immune-checkpoint biomarkers and another immune effector IFN-gamma presented predictive ability in melanoma, urothelial cancer (UC) and clear cell renal-cell cancer (ccRCC). In non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), only PD-L2 and CTLA-4 showed preferable correlation with clinical response. Under different ICB therapies, the top-performing biomarkers were usually mutually exclusive in patients with anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4 therapy, and most of biomarkers presented outstanding predictive power in patients with combined anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4 therapy. Conclusions: Our results show these biomarkers had different performance in predicting ICB response across distinct ICB agents in diverse cancers