Overexpression of MicroRNA-9 inhibits proliferation of human breast cancer cells by targeting STAT3

Purpose: To study the role and therapeutic potential of miR-9 in the treatment of breast cancer.Methods: The expression of miR-9 was evaluated in breast cancer cell lines using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Proliferation was determined by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5- diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay, while cell migration was assessed by wound healing assay. Transfections were performed with Lipofectamine 2000 reagent. Overexpression of miR-9 was performed by transfecting breast cancer cells with miR-9 mimics, and suppression of STAT3 was done with Si-RNA construct. Target identification was carried out using target scan, while protein expression was determined with immunoblotting.Results: The results revealed that miR-9 was significantly (p < 0.05) downregulated in the breast cancer cell lines. Overexpression of miR-9 significantly (p < 0.05) inhibited the proliferation of the breast cancer cells by initiation of apoptosis and cell cycle arrest. In addition, MiR-9 overexpression inhibited the migration of the breast cancer cells. TargetScan analysis showed that STAT3 was the potential target of miR-9: it was significantly downregulated in breast cancer cells overexpressing miR-9. Silencing of STAT3 exerted inhibitory effects on the proliferation and migration of breast cancer cells similar to that of miR-9 overexpression.Conclusion: MiR-9 regulates the proliferation of human breast cancer by targeting STAT3. Hence, miR-9 can be potentially applied as a therapeutic agent for the management of breast cancer.Keywords: Breast cancer, MicroRNA-9, STAT3, Apoptosis, Bioinformatic analysi

Cost and Benefit Analysis for E-Service Applications

Companies are adopting Internet-based electronic services (E-services) attracting customers, sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships and conducting business transactions. Companies in the earlier stages of employing E-services have little information and knowledge on its potential organizational and relational impacts. Through few years practice of E-services, companies have obtained related knowledge. They urgently need to assess the costs to move service online against the benefits received via adopting E-service, and identify the impact of E-service adoption in companies’ relationships with their customers as a result of innovative use of E-services. The initial objective of the research is to explore the relationships between cost factors, benefit factors and customer satisfaction for an E-service application. A further objective is to find a potential path for developing a customer oriented E-service application from its current implementation through identifying the types of changes taking place in the service functions and operations as a result of increased use of E-services. Though conducting a survey, this paper, as a stage report of the project, presents a research framework for E-service evaluation, identifies main cost and benefit factors of E-service and analyses the relationships between these factors. Finally, a cost benefit relationship model is proposed

A Group Decision Making Approach for Dealing with Fuzziness in Decision Process

In order to deal with various imprecise opinions and preferences of decision makers in group decision-making process, this paper proposes a fuzzy group decision-making approach. The approach has three advantages from existing approaches. First, it can handle simultaneously group members’ fuzzy preferences for alternative solutions, fuzzy judgments for solution selection criteria and fuzzy weights for their roles in group decision-making to arrive a group consensus decision. Second, it allows group members to generate selection criteria for the best solution rather than assume them to be given before a group meeting. The third is that it uses general fuzzy number to express linguistic terms which is used to describe the fuzziness of individual preferences, judgments and weights in group decision-making. It therefore accepts any forms of fuzzy number, including triangular fuzzy number, rectangle fuzzy number and continuous fuzzy number, when applying the group decision-making approach

A New Approximate Algorithm for Solving Multiple Objective Linear Programming with Fuzzy Parameters

Many business decisions can be modeled as multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) problems. When formulating a MOLP problem, objective functions and constraints involve many parameters which possible values are assigned by the experts who are often imprecisely or ambiguously known. So, it would be certainly more appropriate to interpret the experts’ understanding of the parameters as fuzzy numerical data which can be represented by fuzzy numbers. This paper focuses on fuzzy multiple objective linear programming (FMOLP) problems with fuzzy parameters in any form of membership function in both objective functions and constraints. Based on the related results of fuzzy linear programming (FLP) and linear programming problems with fuzzy equality and inequality constraints proposed by Zhang et al, this paper firstly proposes related definitions and concepts about FMOLP problems with fuzzy parameters. It then proposes a new approximate algorithm developed for solving the corresponding MOLP problems and the FMOLP problems. Finally, the use of related concepts, theorems, and the proposed approximate algorithm is illustrated by an example involving different cases which include setting various iterate steps, tolerances, weights, and satisfaction levels