Is adjuvant chemotherapy necessary for early gastric cancer?

Objective:To quantify the potential benefit of adjuvant chemotherapy(ACT)with respect to survival,and to identify factors for predicting prognoses in early gastric cancer patients.Methods:Patients with pT1 gastric cancer(GC)who underwent radical resection with D2 lymphadenectomy were retrospectively analyzed.Based on lymph node metastasis(LNM)status and treatment regimens,patients were classified into groups,and clinicopathological variables,overall survival(OS),and disease-specific survival(DSS)were compared.Results:Of 1,050 enrolled patients,151 patients(14.4%)had a positive LNM status.Submucosal invasion,undifferentiated state,tumor size>2 cm,ulceration,and lymphovascular invasion were independent risk factors for LNM using multivariate analyses.The 5-year OS of all patients was 96.4%.HER2 positive,perineural invasion,and LNM were independent factors for worse survival.Patients with pT1N3 GC had a worse 5-year OS and DSS than pT1N0,pT1N1,and pT1N2 patients(P<0.001).The 5-year OS and DSS for pT1N1 patients showed no significant difference between ACT and surgery only patients.For pT1N2 patients,the 5-year OS and DSS showed no significant difference between S-1 and Xelox treatments.For pT1N3 patients,7(36.8%)received S-1,while 12(63.2%)received Xelox treatment.Patients receiving Xelox treatment showed a better 5-year OS(75.0%vs.14.3%)and DSS(81.8%vs.20.0%)than patients receiving S-1(P<0.05).Conclusions:Curative surgery only was adequate for patients with pT1N0 and pT1N1.Xelox showed no survival benefits for pT1N2 patients.Therefore,S-1 is the optimal choice for pT1N2 patients,when considering adverse effects.Xelox is recommended for pT1N3 patients.

Super enhancers:Pathogenic roles and potential therapeutic targets for acute myeloid leukemia(AML)

Acute myeloid leukemia(AML)is a malignant hematological tumor with disordered oncogenes/tumor suppressor genes and limited treatments.The potent anti-cancer effects of bromodomain and extra-terminal domain(BET)inhibitors,targeting the key component of super enhancers,in early clinical trials on AML patients,implies the critical role of super enhancers in AML.Here,we review the concept and characteristic of super enhancer,and then summarize the current researches about super enhancers in AML pathogenesis,diagnosis and classification,followed by illustrate the potential super enhancer-related targets and drugs,and propose the future directions of super enhancers in AML.This information provides integrated insight into the roles of super enhancers in this disease.

MicroRNA target prediction based on second-order Hidden Markov Model

MicroRNAs are one class of small singlestranded RNA of about 22 nt serving as important negative gene regulators.In animals,miRNAs mainly repress protein translation by binding itself to the 3'UTR regions of mRNAs with imperfect complementary pairing.Although bioinformatics investigations have resulted in a number of target prediction tools,all of these have a common shortcoming—a high false positive rate.Therefore,it is important to further filter the predicted targets.In this paper,based on miRNA:target duplex,we construct a second-order Hidden Markov Model,implement Baum-Welch training algorithm and apply this model to further process predicted targets.The model trains the classifier by 244 positive and 49 negative miRNA:target interaction pairs and achieves a sensitivity of 72.54%,specificity of 55.10%and accuracy of 69.62%by 10-fold crossvalidation experiments.In order to further verify the applicability of the algorithm,previously collected datasets,including 195 positive and 38 negative,are chosen to test it,with consistent results.We believe that our method will provide some guidance for experimental biologists,especially in choosing miRNA targets for validation.