18,549 research outputs found
Small-molecule PROTAC mediates targeted protein degradation to treat STAT3-dependent epithelial cancer
The aberrant activation of STAT3 is associated with the etiology and progression in a variety of malignant epithelial-derived tumors, including head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) and colorectal cancer (CRC). Due to the lack of an enzymatic catalytic site or a ligand-binding pocket, there are no small-molecule inhibitors directly targeting STAT3 that have been approved for clinical translation. Emerging proteolysis targeting chimeric (PROTAC) technology-based approach represents a potential strategy to overcome the limitations of conventional inhibitors and inhibit activation of STAT3 and downstream genes. In this study, the heterobifunctional small-molecule-based PROTACs are successfully prepared from toosendanin (TSN), with 1 portion binding to STAT3 and the other portion binding to an E3 ubiquitin ligase. The optimized lead PROTAC (TSM-1) exhibits superior selectivity, potency, and robust antitumor effects in STAT3-dependent HNSCC and CRC - especially in clinically relevant patient-derived xenografts (PDX) and patient-derived organoids (PDO). The following mechanistic investigation identifies the reduced expression of critical downstream STAT3 effectors, through which TSM-1 promotes cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in tumor cells. These findings provide the first demonstration to our knowledge of a successful PROTAC-targeting strategy in STAT3-dependent epithelial cancer
Triple Regression for Camera Agnostic Sim2Real Robot Grasping and Manipulation Tasks
Sim2Real (Simulation to Reality) techniques have gained prominence in robotic
manipulation and motion planning due to their ability to enhance success rates
by enabling agents to test and evaluate various policies and trajectories. In
this paper, we investigate the advantages of integrating Sim2Real into robotic
frameworks. We introduce the Triple Regression Sim2Real framework, which
constructs a real-time digital twin. This twin serves as a replica of reality
to simulate and evaluate multiple plans before their execution in real-world
scenarios. Our triple regression approach addresses the reality gap by: (1)
mitigating projection errors between real and simulated camera perspectives
through the first two regression models, and (2) detecting discrepancies in
robot control using the third regression model. Experiments on 6-DoF grasp and
manipulation tasks (where the gripper can approach from any direction)
highlight the effectiveness of our framework. Remarkably, with only RGB input
images, our method achieves state-of-the-art success rates. This research
advances efficient robot training methods and sets the stage for rapid
advancements in robotics and automation
G2C: A Generator-to-Classifier Framework Integrating Multi-Stained Visual Cues for Pathological Glomerulus Classification
Pathological glomerulus classification plays a key role in the diagnosis of
nephropathy. As the difference between different subcategories is subtle,
doctors often refer to slides from different staining methods to make
decisions. However, creating correspondence across various stains is
labor-intensive, bringing major difficulties in collecting data and training a
vision-based algorithm to assist nephropathy diagnosis. This paper provides an
alternative solution for integrating multi-stained visual cues for glomerulus
classification. Our approach, named generator-to-classifier (G2C), is a
two-stage framework. Given an input image from a specified stain, several
generators are first applied to estimate its appearances in other staining
methods, and a classifier follows to combine visual cues from different stains
for prediction (whether it is pathological, or which type of pathology it has).
We optimize these two stages in a joint manner. To provide a reasonable
initialization, we pre-train the generators in an unlabeled reference set under
an unpaired image-to-image translation task, and then fine-tune them together
with the classifier. We conduct experiments on a glomerulus type classification
dataset collected by ourselves (there are no publicly available datasets for
this purpose). Although joint optimization slightly harms the authenticity of
the generated patches, it boosts classification performance, suggesting more
effective visual cues are extracted in an automatic way. We also transfer our
model to a public dataset for breast cancer classification, and outperform the
state-of-the-arts significantly.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 201
A pyrene-functionalized triazole-linked hexahomotrioxacalix[3]arene as a fluorescent chemosensor for ZnĀ²āŗ ions
A new pyrenyl appended hexahomotrioxacalix[3]arene L featuring 1,2,3-triazole linkers was synthesized as a fluorescent chemosensor for ZnĀ²āŗ in mixed aqueous media. It exhibited high affinity toward ZnĀ²āŗ, and the monomer and excimer emission of the pyrene moieties could be adjusted. The binding stoichiometry of the LĀ·ZnĀ²āŗ complex was determined to be 1:1, and the association constant (Ka) was found to be 7.05 Ć 10ā“ Mā»Ā¹. The binding behavior with ZnĀ²āŗ has been confirmed by Ā¹H NMR spectroscopic analysis
Synthesis and evaluation of a novel fluorescent sensor based on hexahomotrioxacalix[3]arene for ZnĀ²+ and CdĀ²+
A novel type of selective and sensitive fluorescent sensor having triazole rings as the binding sites on the lower rim of a hexahomotrioxacalix[3]arene scaffold in a cone conformation is reported. This sensor has desirable properties for practical applications, including selectivity for detecting ZnĀ²āŗ and CdĀ²āŗ in the presence of excess competing metal ions at low ion concentration or as a fluorescence enhancement type chemosensor due to the cavity of calixarene changing from a āflattened-coneā to a more-upright form and inhibition of PET. In contrast, the results suggested that receptor 1 is highly sensitive and selective for CuĀ²āŗ and FeĀ³āŗ as a fluorescence quenching type chemosensor due to the photoinduced electron transfer (PET) or heavy atom effect
SportsMOT: A Large Multi-Object Tracking Dataset in Multiple Sports Scenes
Multi-object tracking in sports scenes plays a critical role in gathering
players statistics, supporting further analysis, such as automatic tactical
analysis. Yet existing MOT benchmarks cast little attention on the domain,
limiting its development. In this work, we present a new large-scale
multi-object tracking dataset in diverse sports scenes, coined as
\emph{SportsMOT}, where all players on the court are supposed to be tracked. It
consists of 240 video sequences, over 150K frames (almost 15\times MOT17) and
over 1.6M bounding boxes (3\times MOT17) collected from 3 sports categories,
including basketball, volleyball and football. Our dataset is characterized
with two key properties: 1) fast and variable-speed motion and 2) similar yet
distinguishable appearance. We expect SportsMOT to encourage the MOT trackers
to promote in both motion-based association and appearance-based association.
We benchmark several state-of-the-art trackers and reveal the key challenge of
SportsMOT lies in object association. To alleviate the issue, we further
propose a new multi-object tracking framework, termed as \emph{MixSort},
introducing a MixFormer-like structure as an auxiliary association model to
prevailing tracking-by-detection trackers. By integrating the customized
appearance-based association with the original motion-based association,
MixSort achieves state-of-the-art performance on SportsMOT and MOT17. Based on
MixSort, we give an in-depth analysis and provide some profound insights into
SportsMOT. The dataset and code will be available at
https://deeperaction.github.io/datasets/sportsmot.html
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