Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) are some of the most abundant immune cells within tumors and perform a broad repertoire of functions via diverse phenotypes. On the basis of their functional differences in tumor growth, TAMs are usually categorized into two subsets of M1 and M2. It is well established that the tumor microenvironment (TME) is characterized by hypoxia along with tumor progression. TAMs adopt an M1-like pro-inflammatory phenotype at the early phases of oncogenesis and mediate immune response that inhibits tumor growth. As tumors progress, anabatic hypoxia of the TME gradually induces the M2-like functional transformation of TAMs by means of direct effects, metabolic influence, lactic acidosis, angiogenesis, remodeled stroma, and then urges them to participate in immunosuppression, angiogenesis and other tumor-supporting procedure. Therefore, thorough comprehension of internal mechanism of this TAM functional transformation in the hypoxic TME is of the essence, and might provide some novel insights in hypoxic tumor immunotherapeutic strategies.
We read with great interest in a recent article by Liu, et al. 1 on the clinical and CT findings of pregnant patients and children with COVID-19. It is clinically oriented, and of great value to the medical workers on the frontline. It revealed that the clinical symptoms of pregnant women were atypical, despite unavailable data about pregnancy outcome in the study. We mainly focused on the pregnancy outcome in patients with COVID-19. It seems that SARS-CoV-2 would be more friendly than its members of the coronavirus family, 2 such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, which caused severe maternal and neonatal complications. 3 Currently, it is too early yet to explicitly determine the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on pregnant women and their fetuses. 4 Here we explored the impact on pregnancy in patients with COVID-19 from multiple medical centers outside Wuhan, China.We retrospectively analyzed data from 8 pregnant patients who were laboratory-confirmed from January 24 to February 19, 2020. A detailed analysis of clinical features was shown in Table 1 . The age range was 27-33 years. Two (20%) patients had uterine scarring and one patient was twin pregnancy. Five patients (62.5%) developed mild symptoms; three patients (37.5%) showed severe or critical illness requiring ICU admission, one of which undergone ECMO support; four patients (50%) were performed emergency deliveries because of fetal distress or premature rupture of the membrane (PROM). Specially, patient 6 with twin pregnancy had preeclampsia with high blood pressure of 180/100 mmHg and later developed into eclampsia; patient 7 presented with mild symptoms at first and her condition deteriorated rapidly within 6 h after admission, with severe complications including septic shock, septic cardiomyopathy, ARDS, MODS, requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation. Six livebirths and one stillbirth were analyzed. Half of the
Stiffness and viscoelasticity of neural implants regulate the foreign body response. Recent studies have suggested the use of elastic or viscoelastic materials with tissue‐like stiffness for long‐term neural electrical interfacing. Herein, the authors find that a viscoelastic multilayered graphene hydrogel (MGH) membrane, despite exhibiting a much higher Young's modulus than nerve tissues, shows little inflammatory response after 8‐week implantation in rat sciatic nerves. The MGH membrane shows significant viscoelasticity due to the slippage between graphene nanosheets, facilitating its seamless yet minimally compressive interfacing with nerves to reduce the inflammation caused by the stiffness mismatch. When used as neural stimulation electrodes, the MGH membrane can offer abundant ion‐accessible surfaces to bring a charge injection capacity 1–2 orders of magnitude higher than its traditional Pt counterpart, and further demonstrates chronic neural therapy potential in low‐voltage modulation of rat blood pressure. This work suggests that the emergence of 2D nanomaterials and particularly their unique structural attributes can be harnessed to enable new bio‐interfacing design strategies.
Detecting residual nasopharyngeal carcinoma (rNPC) can be difficult because of the coexistence of occult tumours and post-chemoradiation changes, which poses a challenge for both radiologists and surgeons using current imaging methods. Currently, molecular imaging that precisely targets and visualises particular biomarkers in tumours may exceed the specificity and sensitivity of traditional imaging techniques, providing the potential to distinguish tumours from non-neoplastic lesions. Here, we synthesised a HER2/SR-BI-targeted tracer to efficiently position NPC and guide surgery in living mice. This bispecific tracer contained the following two parts: IRDye 800 CW, as an imaging reagent for both optical and optoacoustic imaging, and a fusion peptide (FY-35), as the targeting reagent. Both in vitro and in vivo tests demonstrated that the tracer had higher accumulation and longer retention (up to 48 h) in tumours than a single-targeted probe, and realised sensitive detection of tumours with a minimum size of 3.9 mm. By visualising the vascular network via a customised handheld optoacoustic scan, our intraoperative fluorescence molecular imaging system provides accurate guidance for intraoperative tumour resection. Integrating the advantages of both optical and optoacoustic scanning in an intraoperative image-guided system, this method holds promise for depicting rNPC and guiding salvage surgery.
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