Key PointsQuestionWhat is the effect of convalescent plasma therapy added to standard treatment, compared with standard treatment alone, on clinical outcomes in patients with severe or life-threatening coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)?FindingIn this randomized clinical trial that included 103 patients and was terminated early, the hazard ratio for time to clinical improvement within 28 days in the convalescent plasma group vs the standard treatment group was 1.40 and was not statistically significant.MeaningAmong patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19, convalescent plasma therapy added to standard treatment did not significantly improve the time to clinical improvement within 28 days, although the trial was terminated early and may have been underpowered to detect a clinically important difference.

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MicroRNA miR-26a and long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) MEG3 gene have been independently reported to be tumor suppressor genes in various cancers, but neither has been previously associated with tongue squamous cell carcinoma (TSCC). We report here that miR-26a and lncRNA MEG3 gene expression were both strongly reduced in TSCC compared with levels in matched nonmalignant tissues, and combined low expression levels of both miR-26a and MEG3 emerged as an independent prognostic factor for poor clinical outcome in TSCC patients. Assays in the human TSCC cell lines SCC-15 and CAL27 showed that miR26a targets the DNA methyltransferase 3B transcript and that its inhibition may result in the upregulation of MEG3, providing a plausible link between the observed reduction of miR-26a and MEG3 in TSCC tissue. Furthermore, the overexpression of miR-26a or MEG3 in SCC-15 and CAL27 cells inhibited cell proliferation and cell cycle progression, and promoted cell apoptosis. Considering the poor prognostic outcomes associated with reduced miR-26a and MEG3, our findings imply that these factors likely play important antitumor effects in TSCC pathogenesis. Furthermore, they represent potential prognostic biomarkers for stratification of TSCC patients.Tongue squamous cell carcinoma (TSCC) is the most common type of oral cancer and is well known for its high rate of proliferation and lymph nodal metastasis. 1 In clinical practice, the prediction of prognosis and planning of treatment for patients suffering from oral cancers are predominantly based on the tumor node metastasis (TNM) staging system. 2 However, in many cases of TSCC, these conventional clinical prognostic factors remain inadequate, and are unable to discriminate tumors of the same clinical stage that may have distinct clinical outcomes and different responses to the same treatments. Therefore, the identification and application of additional biomarkers into the prognostic system that better reflect the biologic diversity of TSCC and consequently predict clinical outcomes more accurately is desirable. 3 Differentially expressed genes identified from hundreds of cancer profiling studies over the last several years have yielded numerous biomarkers that have improved the subtyping, classification and diagnosis of tumors for both research and the clinic. However, the human transcriptome comprises not only large numbers of protein-coding messenger RNAs (mRNAs) but also a large set of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) that have structural, regulatory or unknown functions. 4 In TSCC many microRNAs (miRNAs), such as miR-195/184/ 138/21, have been shown to be dysregulated and are believed to contribute to its development and progression. [5][6][7][8] In contrast, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), tentatively defined as ncRNAs more than 200 nt in length, 9 are also known to play key roles in cancer development, 10,11 and aberrant expression of lncRNAs has been functionally associated with lung, breast and prostate carcinomas. 12-14 However, whether lncRNA has relevance to TSCC biology had not been p...

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