Tetraspanins (TSPANs) play crucial roles in cell adhesion, migration, and metastasis of human cancer. However, there is no study in revealing the aspects of TSPAN9 traits and its functions in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) prognosis. Our study is the first to portray the TSPAN9 expression in HCC tissues with immunohistochemistry (IHC) analysis. Subsequently, a series of bioinformatics analyses such as expression estimation, survival assessment, and correlation analysis were implemented to dig out the possible upstream noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) for TSPAN9 in HCC. In this way, the relevance within TSPAN9 and tumor immunity was then explored. We found that the TSPAN9 was downregulated in HCC tissues and had a correlation with HCC prognosis. Furthermore, we identified that the AL139383.1-hsa-miR-9-5p axis was the upstream ncRNA-related pathway most associated with TSPAN9 in HCC. Besides that, expression of TSPAN9 held a significantly negative correlation with tumor immunocyte infiltration as well as immune checkpoint CTLA4. TSPAN9-related immunomodulators were mainly enriched in T cell activation, leukocyte cell-cell adhesion, regulation of T cell activation, and regulation of leukocyte cell-cell adhesion signaling pathway. In conclusion, our results indicated that hsa-miR-9-5p-mediated downregulation of TSPAN9 was associated with poor HCC prognosis, immune-related signaling pathway, and tumor immune infiltration.
For biomedical applications in the terahertz band, composites such as macromolecule compounds, biotissues and phantoms are studied. A description of dielectric properties of composite materials using mathematical models has its own fundamental and technological importance. In this work, we present an iterative effective medium theory for multi-component materials. The model has good performance in describing composite materials with more than two components. The theory is evaluated by comparing with the complex permittivity of three different composite materials. A comparison with other commonly used models is given in the form of relative errors.
The optical properties of the polymer composites consisting of polyvinyl chloride nanofibers and polypropylene films in the frequency range of 0.2–1.0 THz were studied, and the mechanical properties of polyvinyl chloride nanofibers and the structure porosity were investigated. An iterative mathematical model based on effective medium theory was used to describe the effective refractive index and absorption coefficient of the polymer composites. The permittivity tensors of the composites were calculated using the Rytov method. We found that the refractive indices of the composites increased with the increase of polypropylene contents, while absorption coefficients remained the same. The polarization-dependencies of THz optical properties of the composites were relatively low. The proposed composites have the potential to be used as materials for terahertz optical components.
With the fast development of terahertz technology in medical diagnosis and monitoring, it has become important to investigate the application of THz radiation in the cancer treatment assessment during the therapy. In this paper, a buccal drug delivery system is studied as the first step towards this application. The drug delivery system is based on a gelatin-starch biopolymer matrix filled with plasticizing glycerol and various contents of reinforcing particles of bentonite clay. The biopolymers were subjected to morphology analysis using optical microscopy, analysis of mechanical tensile properties, and analysis of terahertz optical properties, followed by a theoretical approach of the experiment. The results show a visible effect of the bentonite content on both of the mechanical and terahertz optical properties of the biopolymer. These findings allow us to confirm the feasibility of using THz radiation for cancer assessment during therapies. The proposed biopolymer also has the potential to be applied as a substrate when carrying out in-vivo optical property measurement of biotissue in terahertz frequency range.
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