Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death for women worldwide. The heterogeneity of this disease presents a big challenge in its therapeutic management. However, recent advances in molecular biology and immunology enable to develop highly targeted therapies for many forms of breast cancer. The primary objective of targeted therapy is to inhibit a specific target/molecule that supports tumor progression. Ak strain transforming, cyclin-dependent kinases, poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase, and different growth factors have emerged as potential therapeutic targets for specific breast cancer subtypes. Many targeted drugs are currently undergoing clinical trials, and some have already received the FDA approval as monotherapy or in combination with other drugs for the treatment of different forms of breast cancer. However, the targeted drugs have yet to achieve therapeutic promise against triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). In this aspect, immune therapy has come up as a promising therapeutic approach specifically for TNBC patients. Different immunotherapeutic modalities including immune-checkpoint blockade, vaccination, and adoptive cell transfer have been extensively studied in the clinical setting of breast cancer, especially in TNBC patients. The FDA has already approved some immune-checkpoint blockers in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs to treat TNBC and several trials are ongoing. This review provides an overview of clinical developments and recent advancements in targeted therapies and immunotherapies for breast cancer treatment. The successes, challenges, and prospects were critically discussed to portray their profound prospects.

Numerous human circular RNAs (circRNAs/circ) have been functionally characterized. However, the potential role of circ-protein kinase C iota (PRKCI) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains unknown. The effects of each transfection and expression levels of circ-PRKCI, microRNA (miR)-1294, miR-186-5p and forkhead box K1 (FOXK1) in HCC cells were analyzed using reverse transcription-quantitative PCR analysis. The interactions between circ-PRKCI and miR-1294 or miR-186-5p, and miR-1294 or miR-186-5p and FOXK1 were validated using dual luciferase reporter assays. The viability, invasion and migration of HCC cells were determined using Cell Counting Kit-8, Transwell and wound healing assays, respectively. The expression levels of FOXK1, hexokinase-2 (HK2), glucose transporter 1 (GLUT1) and lactate dehydrogenase A (LDHA) in HCC cells were analyzed using western blotting. The levels of glucose and lactic acid in the cultured supernatant were detected using commercially available kits. The results of the present study revealed that miR-1294 and miR-186-5p expression levels were downregulated in the HCC cell line, HCCLM3, and were subsequently downregulated by circ-PRKCI overexpression and upregulated by the knockdown of circ-PRKCI. circ-PRKCI overexpression promoted the viability, invasion and migration of HCCLM3 cells, which was also reversed by the overexpression of miR-1294 and miR-186-5p. In addition, the overexpression of circ-PRKCI upregulated FOXK1 expression levels, while the overexpression of miR-1294 and miR-186-5p downregulated FOXK1 expression levels. Conversely, the knockdown of circ-PRKCI expression downregulated FOXK1 expression levels, while the knockdown of miR-1294 and miR-186-5p upregulated FOXK1 expression levels. Furthermore, circ-PRKCI was identified to target miR-1294 and miR-186-5p, and miR-1294 and miR-186-5p were subsequently found to target FOXK1. The overexpression of circ-PRKCI also increased glucose and lactic acid levels, while the knockdown of FOXK1 decreased glucose and lactic acid levels. The knockdown of circ-PRKCI decreased glucose and lactic acid levels, which were reversed by FOXK1 overexpression. In conclusion, the findings of the present study suggested that circ-PRKCI may promote the viability, invasion and migration of HCC cells by sponging miR-1294 and miR-186-5p to upregulate FOXK1 expression levels.

The aim of multi-focus image fusion is to create a synthetic all-in-focus image from several images each of which is obtained with different focus settings. However, if the resolution of source images is low, the fused images with traditional fusion method would be also in low-quality, which hinders further image analysis even the fused image is all-in-focus. This paper presents a novel joint multi-focus image fusion and super-resolution method via convolutional neural network (CNN). The first level network features of different source images are fused with the guidance of the local clarity calculated from the source images. The final high-resolution fused image is obtained with the reconstruction network filters which act like averaging filters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate the fused images with better visual quality and acceptable computation efficiency as compared to other state-of-the-art works.

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As a unique type of RNA, circular RNAs (circRNAs) are important regulators of multiple biological processes in the progression of cancer. However, the potential role of most circRNAs in breast cancer lung metastasis is still unknown. In this study, we characterized and further investigated circIQCH (hsa_circ_0104345) by analyzing the circRNA microarray profiling in our previous study. circIQCH was upregulated in breast cancer tissues, especially in the metastatic sites. CCK-8, transwell, wound-healing and mouse xenograft assays were carried out to investigate the functions of circIQCH. Knockdown of circIQCH inhibited breast cancer cell proliferation and migration to lung. Moreover, luciferase reporter assays and RNA immunoprecipitation assays were performed to elucidate the underlying molecular mechanism of circIQCH. The results showed that circIQCH sponges miR-145 and promotes breast cancer progression by upregulating DNMT3A. In summary, our study demonstrated the pivotal role of circIQCH-miR-145-DNMT3A axis in breast cancer growth and metastasis via the mechanism of competing endogenous RNAs. Thus, circIQCH could be a potential therapeutic target for breast cancer.