BRCA mutations occur frequently in breast cancer (BC), but their prognostic impact on outcomes of BC has not been determined. We conducted an updated meta-analysis on the association between BRCA mutations and survival in patients with BC. Electronic databases were searched. The primary outcome measure was overall survival (OS), and the secondary outcome measures included breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) and event-free survival (EFS). Hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were abstracted and pooled with random-effect modeling. Data from 297, 402 patients with BC were pooled from 34 studies. The median prevalence rates of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations were 14.5% and 8.3%, respectively. BRCA mutations were associated with worse OS (BRCA1: HR = 1.69, 95% CI, 1.35 to 2.12, p < 0.001; BRCA2: HR = 1.50, 95% CI 1.03 to 2.19, p = 0.034). However, this did not translate into poor BCSS (BRCA1: HR = 1.14, 95% CI, 0.81 to 1.16, p = 0.448; BRCA2: HR = 1.16; 95% CI 0.82 to 1.66, p = 0.401) or EFS (BRCA1: HR = 1.10, 95% CI, 0.86 to 1.41, p = 0.438; BRCA2: HR= 1.09; 95% CI 0.81 to 1.47, p = 0.558). Several studies analyzed BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations together and found no impact on OS (HR = 1.21; 95% CI, 0.73 to 2.00, p = 0.454) or EFS (HR = 0.94; 95% CI, 0.60 to 1.48, p = 0.787). BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations were associated with poor OS in patients with BC, but had no significant impact on BCSS or EFS. An improved survival was observed in BC patients who had BRCA1 mutation and treated with endocrinotherapy. The results may have therapeutic and prognostic implications important for BRCA mutation carriers with BC.

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LZ-106, a newly synthetized analog of quinolone, has been shown to be highly effective in NSCLC in both cultured cells and xenograft mouse model with low toxicity, yet the molecular mechanisms still requires exploration. Here, we substantiated the involvement of P53 activation in intracellular ROS generation upon LZ-106 treatment, and related P53 to the ROS-induced viability inhibition and apoptosis, which was exhibited in the previous research. P53 was shown to play an indispensable role in the elevated levels of intracellular ROS in LZ-106-treated NSCLC cells through ROS detection. We further identified the anti-proliferation effect of LZ-106 in NSCLC cells through G1 phase cell cycle arrest by cell cycle analysis, with the expression analysis of the key proteins, and discovered that the cell cycle arrest effect is also mediated by induction of ROS in a P53-dependent manner. In addition, the tumor suppression effect exhibited in vivo was demonstrated to be similar to that in vitro, which requires the participation of P53. Thus, LZ-106 is a potent antitumor drug possessing potent proliferation inhibition and apoptosis induction ability through the P53-dependent ROS modulation both in vitro and in vivo.

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Cellular structure can possess superior mechanical properties and low density simultaneously. Additive manufacturing has experienced substantial progress in the past decades, which promotes the popularity of such bone-like structure. This paper proposes a methodology on the topological design of porous structure. For the typical technologies such as the p-norm aggregation and implicit porosity control, the violation of the maximum local volume constraint is inevitable. To this end, the primary optimization problem with bounds of local volume constraints is transformed into unconstrained programming by setting up a sequence of minimization sub-problems in terms of the augmented Lagrangian method. The approximation and algorithm using the concept of moving asymptotes is employed as the optimizer. Several numerical tests are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison with existing approaches. The effects of the global and local volume percentage, influence radius and mesh discretization on the final designs are investigated. In comparison to existing methods, the proposed method is capable of accurately limiting the upper bound of global and local volume fractions, which opens up new possibilities for additive manufacturing.

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is a highly aggressive malignancy and treatment failure is largely due to metastasis and invasion. Aberrant tumor cell adhesion is often associated with tumor progression and metastasis. However, the exact details of cell adhesion in ESCC progression have yet to be determined. In our study, the clinical relevance of Pax2 transactivation domain-interacting protein (PTIP/PAXIP1) was analyzed by immunohistochemistry of ESCC tissues. We found that low expression of PTIP was associated with lymph node metastasis in ESCC, and loss-of-function approaches showed that depletion of PTIP promoted ESCC cell migration and invasion both in vitro and in vivo. Analysis integrating RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data revealed that PTIP directly regulated ephrin type-A receptor 2 (EphA2) expression in ESCC cells. Moreover, PTIP inhibited EphA2 expression by competing with Fosl2, which attenuated the invasion ability of ESCC cells. These results collectively suggest that PTIP regulates ESCC invasion through modulation of EphA2 expression and hence presents a potential therapeutic target for its treatment.

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