BackgroundTo study the association between Apelin expression and the clinical features and postoperative prognosis in patients with gastric cancer (Int J Cancer 136:2388-2401, 2015).MethodsTumor samples and matched adjacent normal tissues were collected from 270 patients with GC receiving surgical resection. The tumor and serum Apelin levels were determined by immunohistochemistry and ELISA methods, respectively. GC cell lines were cultured for migration and invasive assays.ResultsOur data showed that tumor Apelin expression status, instead of serum Apelin level, was closely associated with more advance clinical features including tumor differentiation, lymph node and distant metastases. Moreover, patients with high tumor Apelin level had a significantly shorter overall survival period compared to those with low Apelin expression and those with or negative Apelin staining. Our in vitro study revealed that the Apelin regulated the migration and invasion abilities of GC cell lines, accompanied by up-regulations of a variety of cytokines associated with tumor invasiveness.ConclusionOur data suggest that tumor Apelin can be used as a marker to evaluate clinical characteristics and predict prognosis in GC patients.

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A home energy management system (HEMS) can potentially enable demand response (DR) applications for residential customers. This paper presents a detailed pricing-based DR for a smart home with various types of household appliances considering customer satisfaction. A wide variety of household appliances with different characteristics, together with energy storage units (ESUs) and distributed energy resources (DERs) can be flexibly incorporated in the proposed scheme. Besides, with a developed satisfaction model suitable for different types of household appliances, the proposed HEMS can provide multiple flexible solutions with different user satisfaction levels to occupants. In addition, other different DR strategies such as demand-limit-based DR and injection-limit-based DR can be easily adapted to the formulated scheme in this work. The numerical results reported in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The proposed scheme is generally applicable and valuable for any other kinds of the smart home.

Purpose: Early detection and intervention can decrease the mortality of breast cancer significantly. Assessments of genetic/ genomic variants in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) have generated great enthusiasm for their potential application as clinically actionable biomarkers in the management of earlystage breast cancer.Experimental Design: In this study, 861 serial plasma and matched tissue specimens from 102 patients with early-stage breast cancer who need chemotherapy and 50 individuals with benign breast tumors were deeply sequenced via nextgeneration sequencing (NGS) techniques using large gene panels.Results: Cancer tissues in this cohort of patients showed profound intratumor heterogeneities (ITHGs) that were properly reflected by ctDNA testing. Integrating the ctDNA detection rate of 74.2% in this cohort with the corresponding predictive results based on Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System classification (BI-RADS) could increase the positive predictive value up to 92% and potentially dramatically reduce surgical overtreatment. Patients with positive ctDNA after surgery showed a higher percentage of lymph node metastasis, indicating potential recurrence and remote metastasis. The ctDNA-positive rates were significantly decreased after chemotherapy in basal-like and Her2 þ tumor subtypes, but were persistent despite chemotherapy in luminal type. The tumor mutation burden in blood (bTMB) assessed on the basis of ctDNA testing was positively correlated with the TMB in tumor tissues (tTMB), providing a candidate biomarker warranting further study of its potentials used for precise immunotherapy in cancer.Conclusions: These data showed that ctDNA evaluation is a feasible, sensitive, and specific biomarker for diagnosis and differential diagnosis of patients with early-stage breast cancer who need chemotherapy.

Recent research indicates that RBMS3 may act as a tumor suppressor gene (TSG) in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). It has been reported that RBMS3 directly binds to the promoter region of c-Myc in ESCC and that β-catenin from both whole cell extracts and nuclear fractionation was significantly downregulated in RBMS3-transfected NPC cells compared to control cells. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical significance of the RBMS3 gene expression in relation to the expression of Wnt pathway components in patients with lung squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC). RBMS3, c-Myc and cytoplasmic β-catenin were detected in 39.76, 56.63 and 89.16 % of 83 LSCC samples by immunohistochemistry, respectively, in 83 primary LSCC samples. Semiquantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting demonstrated decreased RBMS3 mRNA and expression in 33.33 % (10/30) and 36.67 % (11/30) tumor tissues, respectively. Statistical correlation analysis showed RBMS3 to be negatively correlated with c-Myc (r = -0.384, p < 0.001) and not correlated with cytoplasmic β-catenin in the LSCC samples. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards model analysis showed that the combined marker RBMS3/c-Myc was an independent prognostic indicator of overall survival (p = 0.001; HR 3.470; IC 95 %, 1.652-7.290), and c-Myc was a prognostic indicator of disease-free survival (p < 0.001; HR 3.182; IC 95 %, 1.961-8.920). RBMS3 is a novel TSG in LSCC, and its downregulation facilitates development and progression of LSCC. Therefore, it is suggested that Rbms3 as a tumor marker may play an important role in diagnosis of LSCC.