Increased glucose influx and glycogenesis in lung cancer cells surviving after irradiation

Identification and validation of a disulfidptosis-related genes prognostic signature in lung adenocarcinoma

Disulfidptosis, a newly revealed form of cell death, regulated by numerous genes that has been recently identified. The exact role of disulfidptosis in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) still uncertain. Objective of this study was to explore potential prognostic markers among disulfidptosis genes in LUAD. By combining transcriptomic information from Gene Expression Omnibus databases and The Cancer Genome Atlas, we identified differentially expressed and prognostic disulfidptosis genes. By conducting least absolute shrinkage and selection operator with multivariate Cox regression, four disulfidptosis genes were selected to create the prognostic signature. The implementation of the signature separated the training and validation cohorts into groups with high- and low-risk. Subsequently, the model was verified by conducting an independent analysis of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Further comparisons were made between the two risk-divided groups with regards the tumor microenvironment, immune cell infiltration, immunotherapy response, and drug sensitivity. The signature was constructed using four disulfidptosis-related genes: SLC7A11, SLC3A2, NCKAP1, and GYS1. According to ROC curves, the signature was effective for predicting LUAD prognosis. In addition, the prognostic signature correlated with sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents and the efficacy of immunotherapy in LUAD. Finally, through external validation, we showed that NCKAP1 are correlated with tumor migration, proliferation, and invasion of LUAD cells. GYS1 affects immune cell, especially M2 macrophage infiltration in the tumor microenvironment. The disulfidptosis four-gene model can reliably predict the prognosis of patients diagnosed with LUAD, thereby providing valuable information for clinical applications and immunotherapy.

Applications and Advances of Multicellular Tumor Spheroids: Challenges in Their Development and Analysis

Biomedical research requires both in vitro and in vivo studies in order to explore disease processes or drug interactions. Foundational investigations have been performed at the cellular level using two-dimensional cultures as the gold-standard method since the early 20th century. However, three-dimensional (3D) cultures have emerged as a new tool for tissue modeling over the last few years, bridging the gap between in vitro and animal model studies. Cancer has been a worldwide challenge for the biomedical community due to its high morbidity and mortality rates. Various methods have been developed to produce multicellular tumor spheroids (MCTSs), including scaffold-free and scaffold-based structures, which usually depend on the demands of the cells used and the related biological question. MCTSs are increasingly utilized in studies involving cancer cell metabolism and cell cycle defects. These studies produce massive amounts of data, which demand elaborate and complex tools for thorough analysis. In this review, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of several up-to-date methods used to construct MCTSs. In addition, we also present advanced methods for analyzing MCTS features. As MCTSs more closely mimic the in vivo tumor environment, compared to 2D monolayers, they can evolve to be an appealing model for in vitro tumor biology studies.

Review: Mechanisms and perspective treatment of radioresistance in non-small cell lung cancer

Radiotherapy is the major treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The radioresistance and toxicity are the main obstacles that leading to therapeutic failure and poor prognosis. Oncogenic mutation, cancer stem cells (CSCs), tumor hypoxia, DNA damage repair, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), and tumor microenvironment (TME) may dominate the occurrence of radioresistance at different stages of radiotherapy. Chemotherapy drugs, targeted drugs, and immune checkpoint inhibitors are combined with radiotherapy to treat NSCLC to improve the efficacy. This article reviews the potential mechanism of radioresistance in NSCLC, and discusses the current drug research to overcome radioresistance and the advantages of Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in improving the efficacy and reducing the toxicity of radiotherapy.