Development history and research progress of sentinel lymph node biopsy in breast cancer

Sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) is a surgical technique for diagnosing and treating purposes in breast cancer, which is one of the major advances with milestone significance in the field of breast surgery. As a less-invasive axillary surgery, the development of SLNB has shown a de-escalating trend in the recent 40 years, depending on the greatly improved efficacy of multidiscipline treatment in breast cancer, which indirectly reflects the essence that breast cancer is a systemic disease. First, a series of clinical trials such as Milan SLNB185 and NSABP-B32 confirmed that SLNB is an accurate axillary staging procedure for patients with clinically node-negative early breast cancer. Next, results from ACOSOG Z0011 and IBCSG 23-01 trials further enriched the concept of de-escalating axillary surgery in the sentinel lymph node (SLN)-positive patients and showed that routine axillary lymph node dissection (ALND) can be safely replaced by SLNB in patients with limited tumor burden present with SLN. Furthermore, SLNB and deriving clipped lymph node biopsy extend the target population of minimally invasive axillary surgery to the patients undergoing neoadjuvant therapy. In the recent few years, numerous retrospective studies represented by EUBREAST-061 study and a limited number of prospective studies have preliminarily confirmed the oncological safety of de-escalating axillary surgery in the setting of neoadjuvant therapy. In the future, related research will focus on finding suitable candidates for omitting SLNB including a selected group of low-risk early breast cancer or exceptional responders in neoadjuvant therapy, and the long-term follow-up data of relevant high-quality clinical trials such as SOUND and BOOG 2013-08 are yet to be mature. This article summarized the development history, research progress and future outlook of SLNB, in order to provide a reference for clinicians

1-(2,3-Dimeth­oxy­benzyl­idene)-2-(2,4-dinitro­phen­yl)hydrazine

In the title compound, C15H14N4O6, the dihedral angle between the aromatic rings is 3.7 (4)°. The nitro groups make dihedral angles of 6.0 (4) and 5.2 (4)° with the parent ring and are oriented at 6.0 (6)° with respect to each other. The meth­oxy groups are inclined at 54.0 (2) and 2.5 (3)° with respect to the benzene ring to which they are attached. In the crystal, mol­ecules are linked by weak C—H⋯O inter­actions. The mol­ecular conformation is consolidated by an intra­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bond

Advances in fundamental and translational breast cancer research in 2022

According to the data released by the International Cancer Research Institute of the World Health Organization (WHO), breast cancer is the malignant tumor with the highest incidence rate in women, and seriously endangers women's health.Many impressive advances have been achieved in fundamental and translational research of breast cancer, which deepened the understanding of the molecular nature of breast cancer and provided new scientific strategies for the precision treatment of breast cancer. This paper summarized the annual advances in fundamental and translational breast cancer research in 2022 in seven sections: tumor metabolism, tumor microenvironment, microbes and tumors, tumor metastasis, tumor drug resistance and drug screening, multi-omics research and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, we proposed an outlook on the future directions of breast cancer research to provide a reference for future studies

Context-Aware Block Net for Small Object Detection.

State-of-the-art object detectors usually progressively downsample the input image until it is represented by small feature maps, which loses the spatial information and compromises the representation of small objects. In this article, we propose a context-aware block net (CAB Net) to improve small object detection by building high-resolution and strong semantic feature maps. To internally enhance the representation capacity of feature maps with high spatial resolution, we delicately design the context-aware block (CAB). CAB exploits pyramidal dilated convolutions to incorporate multilevel contextual information without losing the original resolution of feature maps. Then, we assemble CAB to the end of the truncated backbone network (e.g., VGG16) with a relatively small downsampling factor (e.g., 8) and cast off all following layers. CAB Net can capture both basic visual patterns as well as semantical information of small objects, thus improving the performance of small object detection. Experiments conducted on the benchmark Tsinghua-Tencent 100K and the Airport dataset show that CAB Net outperforms other top-performing detectors by a large margin while keeping real-time speed, which demonstrates the effectiveness of CAB Net for small object detection

First Efficacy Results of Capecitabine with Anthracycline- and Taxane-Based Adjuvant Therapy in High-Risk Early Breast Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

Background: Capecitabine is effective and indicated for the salvage treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate the efficacy of capecitabine in the adjuvant setting. There have been two large randomized studies to determine whether patients with high-risk early breast cancer benefit from the addition of capecitabine to standard chemotherapy, but they have yielded inconsistent results. We first undertook a meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy of the addition of capecitabine over standard treatment

Site-specific relapse pattern of the triple negative tumors in Chinese breast cancer patients

BACKGROUND: It has been reported that triple negative phenotype is characterized by aggressive clinical history in Western breast cancer patients, however its pattern of metastatic spread had never been reported in the Chinese population. Considering racial disparities, we sought to analyze the spread pattern for different sites of first recurrence in Chinese triple negative breast cancers. METHODS: A retrospective study of 1662 patients was carried out from a large database of breast cancer patients undergoing surgery between January 1, 2000 and March 31, 2004 at the Cancer Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Survival curves were generated using the Kaplan-Meier method and annual relapse hazards were estimated by the hazard function. RESULTS: We found a statistically significant difference in relapse-free survival (RFS) for locoregional and visceral recurrence (P = 0.007 and P = 0.025, respectively) among the triple negative, ERBB2+ and HR+/ERBB2- subgroups in univariate analysis. In the multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression analysis, RFS for either locoregional or visceral relapse in the triple negative category was inferior to that in HR+/ERBB2- patients (P = 0.027 and P = 0.005, respectively), but comparable to that in ERBB2+ women (both P >0.05). Furthermore, the early relapse peak appeared later in the triple negative group than that in the ERBB2+ counterpart for both locoregional and visceral relapse. On the other hand, when compared with triple negative breast cancers, a significantly lower risk of developing bone relapse was discerned for ERBB2+ women (P = 0.048; HR = 0.384, 95% CI 0.148-0.991), with the borderline significance for HR+/ERBB2- breast cancers (P = 0.058; HR = 0.479, 95% CI 0.224-1.025). In terms of bone metastasis, the hazard rate remained higher for the triple negative category than that for the ERBB2+ subtype. CONCLUSION: Based on the site-specific spread pattern in different subgroups, the triple negative category of breast cancers in the Chinese population exhibits a different pattern of relapse, which indicates that different organotropism may be due to the different intrinsic subtypes. A better knowledge of the triple negative category is warranted for efficacious systemic regimens to decrease and/or delay the relapse hazard

Optimization of Rolling-Circle Amplified Protein Microarrays for Multiplexed Protein Profiling

Protein microarray-based approaches are increasingly being used in research and clinical applications to either profile the expression of proteins or screen molecular interactions. The development of high-throughput, sensitive, convenient, and cost-effective formats for detecting proteins is a necessity for the effective advancement of understanding disease processes. In this paper, we describe the generation of highly multiplexed, antibody-based, specific, and sensitive protein microarrays coupled with rolling-circle signal amplification (RCA) technology. A total of 150 cytokines were simultaneously detected in an RCA sandwich immunoassay format. Greater than half of these proteins have detection sensitivities in the pg/mL range. The validation of antibody microarray with human serum indicated that RCA-based protein microarrays are a powerful tool for high-throughput analysis of protein expression and molecular diagnostics

Statistical Prediction of the South China Sea Surface Height Anomaly

Based on the simple ocean data assimilation (SODA) data, this study analyzes and forecasts the monthly sea surface height anomaly (SSHA) averaged over South China Sea (SCS). The approach to perform the analysis is a time series decomposition method, which decomposes monthly SSHAs in SCS to the following three parts: interannual, seasonal, and residual terms. Analysis results demonstrate that the SODA SSHA time series are significantly correlated to the AVISO SSHA time series in SCS. To investigate the predictability of SCS SSHA, an exponential smoothing approach and an autoregressive integrated moving average approach are first used to fit the interannual and residual terms of SCS SSHA while keeping the seasonal part invariant. Then, an array of forecast experiments with the start time spanning from June 1977 to June 2007 is performed based on the prediction model which integrates the above two models and the time-independent seasonal term. Results indicate that the valid forecast time of SCS SSHA of the statistical model is about 7 months, and the predictability of SCS SSHA in Spring and Autumn is stronger than that in Summer and Winter. In addition, the prediction skill of SCS SSHA has remarkable decadal variability, with better phase forecast in 1997-2007

Regulation of mitochondrial biogenesis in erythropoiesis by mTORC1-mediated protein translation.

Advances in genomic profiling present new challenges of explaining how changes in DNA and RNA are translated into proteins linking genotype to phenotype. Here we compare the genome-scale proteomic and transcriptomic changes in human primary haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells and erythroid progenitors, and uncover pathways related to mitochondrial biogenesis enhanced through post-transcriptional regulation. Mitochondrial factors including TFAM and PHB2 are selectively regulated through protein translation during erythroid specification. Depletion of TFAM in erythroid cells alters intracellular metabolism, leading to elevated histone acetylation, deregulated gene expression, and defective mitochondria and erythropoiesis. Mechanistically, mTORC1 signalling is enhanced to promote translation of mitochondria-associated transcripts through TOP-like motifs. Genetic and pharmacological perturbation of mitochondria or mTORC1 specifically impairs erythropoiesis in vitro and in vivo. Our studies support a mechanism for post-transcriptional control of erythroid mitochondria and may have direct relevance to haematologic defects associated with mitochondrial diseases and ageing