Volume 101 Issue 5, May 2021

Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models are valuable platforms to assess preclinical and clinical trials for cancer therapy including lung cancer. The authors clarified that enriched expression of immune system-associated genes such as CD19 and CD23 are the most critical factors to obstacle the PDX generation, particularly in lung squamous cell carcinoma.

This study confirms that the expression of GTSE1 in prostate cancer is significantly increased and negatively correlated with patient prognosis. Furthermore, GTSE1 promotes prostate cancer cell proliferation via the SP1/FOXM1 signaling pathway, which facilitates tumorigenesis and progression. These results suggest that GTSE1 has potential value as a prognostic marker and therapeutic target in prostate cancer.

PLODs play important roles in cancer progression. In silico analysis of PLOD expression in ovarian cancer was performed. PLOD-enriched pathways and related genes were validated by immunohistochemistry in OvCa tissue blocks and in vivo xenograft murine models. PLODs are generally overexpressed in OvCa and each PLOD may be functionally non-redundant.

In this study, the authors show that the long noncoding RNA LINC01419 enhances the methylation of the ZIC1 promoter, inhibits ZIC1 expression, and activates the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway, thereby enhancing the malignant phenotypes of hepatocellular carcinoma cells in vitro as well as tumor formation and metastasis.

The findings of the present study demonstrate that inflammasome NLRP3 deficiency did not attenuate, but enhanced hepatocellular steatosis, injury and death, inflammation, and fibrosis, as well as insulin resistance in both liver and adipose tissues. This effect is probably due to an enhanced inflammatory response with elevated monocyte chemotactic protein-1 and M1 microphages.

The authors provide evidence that EZH2 inhibits miR-138 expression by histone methylation of its promoter, which induces cartilage degeneration in osteoarthritis models by upregulating expression of the syndecan proteoglycan SDC1. These results suggest a novel mechanistic strategy for future treatments.

In this study, the authors reveal that the hypoxic microenvironment stimulates glioma to generate miR-1246- and miR-10b-5p-rich exosomes, which are delivered to normoxic glioma cells to promote their migration and invasion by targeting FRK and TFAP2A respectively. Treatment targeting the exosomes and microRNAs may impair the motility of gliomas, providing a novel direction for the development of antitumor therapy.

Recent studies highlight a prominent role of human lung pericytes in lung diseases. However, human lung pericytes usually stop growth within ten passages. This study successfully established an immortalized human lung pericyte cell line, which exhibited sustained proliferation, retained pericyte characteristics and function, is a promising tool for in vitro pericyte studies.

This study demonstrates that ATF-3 plays a suppressive function in melanoma tumor progression via a significant decrease in expression in metastatic melanoma and correlation with tumor virulence. ATF-3 overexpression significantly inhibits cell growth, migration, and invasion in vitro, and abrogates tumor growth in a human melanoma xenograft mouse model in vivo.

The authors report the successful assessment of LD-RT-PCR, a cheap, fast, sensitive, specific, and easily upgradable assay for routine detection of theranostic gene translocations and MET exon 14 skipping in thoracic oncology. It appears to be an excellent cost-effective alternative to FISH and to more expensive and complex assays such as RNA-seq.

Tissue cytometry is a promising new microscopy technique that can be used to enumerate and characterize each cell in a tissue. Here the authors describe a complete and accessible pipeline, including methods of sample preparation, microscopy, image analysis, and data analysis for large-scale three-dimensional tissue cytometry of human kidney tissues.