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Podoplanin (PDPN) is a transmembrane receptor glycoprotein that is upregulated on transformed cells, cancer associated fibroblasts and inflammatory macrophages that contribute to cancer progression. In particular, PDPN increases tumor cell clonal capacity, epithelial mesenchymal transition, migration, invasion, metastasis and inflammation. Antibodies, CAR‐T cells, biologics and synthetic compounds that target PDPN can inhibit cancer progression and septic inflammation in preclinical models. This review describes recent advances in how PDPN may be used as a biomarker and therapeutic target for many types of cancer, including glioma, squamous cell carcinoma, mesothelioma and melanoma.

We propose in this paper a novel framework for multilevel routing considering both routability and performance. The two-stage multilevel framework consists of coarsening followed by uncoarsening. Unlike the previous multilevel routing, we integrate global routing, detailed routing, and resource estimation together at each level of the framework, leading to more accurate routing resource estimation during coarsening and thus facilitating the solution refinement during uncoarsening. Further, the exact routing information obtained at each level makes our framework more flexible in dealing with various routing objectives (such as crosstalk, power, etc). Experimental results show that our approach obtains significantly better routing solutions than previous works. For example, for a set of 11 commonly used benchmark circuits, our approach achieves 100% routing completion for all circuits while the previous multilevel routing, the three-level routing, and the hierarchical routing can complete routing for only 3, 0, 3 circuits, respectively. In particular, the number of routing layers used by our router is even smaller. We also have performed experiments on timing-driven routing. The results are also very promising.

Given a set of pins and a set of obstacles on a plane, an obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (OARSMT) connects these pins, possibly through some additional points (called the Steiner points), and avoids running through any obstacle to construct a tree with a minimal total wirelength. The OARSMT problem becomes more important than ever for modern nanometer IC designs which need to consider numerous routing obstacles incurred from power networks, prerouted nets, IP blocks, feature patterns for manufacturability improvement, antenna jumpers for reliability enhancement, etc. Consequently, the OARSMT problem has received dramatically increasing attention recently. Nevertheless, considering obstacles significantly increases the problem complexity, and thus, most previous works suffer from either poor quality or expensive running time. Based on the obstacle-avoiding spanning graph, this paper presents an efficient algorithm with some theoretical optimality guarantees for the OARSMT construction. Unlike previous heuristics, our algorithm guarantees to find an optimal OARSMT for any two-pin net and many higher pin nets. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm results in significantly shorter wirelengths than all state-of-the-art works.