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A large variety of recently predicted and synthesized 2D materials significantly broaden the capabilities of magnetic interface design for spintronic applications. Their diverse structural and electronic properties allow fine adjustment of interfacial interactions between the electrode and spacer materials providing robust and effective spin transport. Based on recent experimental results, here we present a theoretical study of novel interfaces formed by a half-metallic Co2FeGe1/2Ga1/2 (CFGG) substrate with h-BN or MoSe2 monolayer on its top. By means of the DFT approach, the structural, magnetic and electronic properties are studied for the Co- and FeGeGa termination of the CFGG surface. The observed large spin polarization in the vicinity of the interface and robust magnetization exhibit the potential of 2D materials/CFGG heterostructures for spintronic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skin barrier function (SBF) disorders are a class of pathologies that affect a significant portion of the world population. These disorders cause skin lesions with intense itch, impacting patients' physical and psychological well-being as well as their social functioning. It is in the interest of patients that their disorder be monitored closely while under treatment to evaluate the effectiveness of the ongoing therapy and any potential adverse reactions. Symptom-based assessment techniques are widely used by clinicians; however, they carry some limitations. Techniques to assess skin barrier impairment are critical for understanding the nature of the disease and for helping personalize treatment. This review recalls the anatomy of the skin barrier and describes an atomic-force microscopy approach to quantitatively monitor its disorders and their response to treatment. We review a panel of studies that show that this technique is highly relevant for SBF disorder research, and we aim to motivate its adoption into clinical settings., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The presence of pharmaceuticals in the environment is an issue of growing concern. The European Commission adopted the "European Union Strategic Approach to Pharmaceuticals in the Environment", which focuses on actions to reduce the risk of pharmaceuticals in the environment, including how environmental aspects can become part of medical training programs., Objective: Obtain data from pharmacy students about pharmaceutical pollution to provide information about the training needs that may help develop new actions related to the training and dissemination of this issue., Methods: A total of 1614 pharmacy students from 5 Schools of Pharmacy in Spain completed a self-administered questionnaire consisting of 24 questions: 13 about knowledge, 8 related to attitude, and 3 to opinion., Results: Around 75% of students reported that they did not know "One Health" or "emerging pollutant" concepts and around 88% declared that they did not know that diclofenac caused a catastrophic vulture decline in Asia. The importance of this topic and their attitude to acquiring new knowledge was evaluated higher than 8 points out of 10, while received training during their studies was a score of 2.8 points out of 10., Conclusion: The knowledge about key concepts was relatively poor. In fact, they judged training about pharmaceuticals in the environment during their pharmacy studies was very scarce. However, students consider drug pollution to be a very important issue and have a very good attitude toward acquiring knowledge about it., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The fibrotic tumor microenvironment is a pivotal therapeutic target. Nintedanib, a clinically approved multikinase antifibrotic inhibitor, is effective against lung adenocarcinoma (ADC) but not squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). Previous studies have implicated the secretome of tumor-associated fibroblasts (TAFs) in the selective effects of nintedanib in ADC, but the driving factor(s) remained unidentified. Here we examined the role of tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-1 (TIMP-1), a tumor-promoting cytokine overproduced in ADC-TAFs. To this aim, we combined genetic approaches with in vitro and in vivo preclinical models based on patient-derived TAFs. Nintedanib reduced TIMP-1 production more efficiently in ADC-TAFs than SCC-TAFs through a SMAD3-dependent mechanism. Cell culture experiments indicated that silencing TIMP1 in ADC-TAFs abolished the therapeutic effects of nintedanib on cancer cell growth and invasion, which were otherwise enhanced by the TAF secretome. Consistently, co-injecting ADC cells with TIMP1-knockdown ADC-TAFs into immunocompromised mice elicited a less effective reduction of tumor growth and invasion under nintedanib treatment compared to tumors bearing unmodified fibroblasts. Our results unveil a key mechanism underlying the selective mode of action of nintedanib in ADC based on the excessive production of TIMP-1 in ADC-TAFs. We further pinpoint reduced SMAD3 expression and consequent limited TIMP-1 production in SCC-TAFs as key for the resistance of SCC to nintedanib. These observations strongly support the emerging role of TIMP-1 as a critical regulator of therapy response in solid tumors., (© 2024 The Authors. Cancer Science published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Japanese Cancer Association.)

The advent of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) has represented a breakthrough in the treatment of many cancers, although a high number of patients fail to respond to ICIs, which is partially due to the ability of tumor cells to evade immune system surveillance. Non-coding microRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to modulate the immune evasion of tumor cells, and there is thus growing interest in elucidating whether these miRNAs could be targetable or proposed as novel biomarkers for prognosis and treatment response to ICIs. We therefore performed an extensive literature analysis to evaluate the clinical utility of miRNAs with a confirmed direct relationship with treatment response to ICIs. As a result of this systematic review, we have stratified the miRNA landscape into (i) miRNAs whose levels directly modulate response to ICIs, (ii) miRNAs whose expression is modulated by ICIs, and (iii) miRNAs that directly elicit toxic effects or participate in immune-related adverse events (irAEs) caused by ICIs.

Activation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) has been shown to be important in physiological processes other than detoxification, including vascular homeostasis. Although AhR is highly expressed in the endothelium, its function has been poorly studied. This systematic review aims to summarise current knowledge on the AhR role in the endothelium and its cardiovascular implications. We focus on endogenous AhR agonists, such as some uremic toxins and other agonists unrelated to environmental pollutants, as well as studies using AhR knockout models. We conclude that AhR activation leads to vascular oxidative stress and endothelial dysfunction and that blocking AhR signalling could provide a new target for the treatment of vascular disorders such as cardiovascular complications in patients with chronic kidney disease or pulmonary arterial hypertension.

A multifunctional hybrid constructed for controlling the delivery and activation of Pt anticancer agents in vitro is described herein. We employed consensus tetratricopeptide repeat protein (CTPR) for the covalent co-anchoring of riboflavin (photocatalyst) and a Pt(IV) prodrug complex. The Pt-loaded flavoprotein induced a 40% reduction in PANC-1 cell viability as a result of the photocatalytic formation of cisplatin.

Photoactivatable Pt(IV) prodrugs represent nowadays an intriguing class of potential metal-based drugs, endowed with more chemical inertness in their oxidized form and better selectivity for the target with respect to the clinically established Pt(II) compounds. In fact, they have the possibility to be reduced by light irradiation directly at the site of interest. For this reason, we synthesized a new Pt(IV) complex, [Pt(OCOCH 3 ) 3 (4'-phenyl-2,2':6',2''-terpyridine)][CF 3 SO 3 ] ( 1 ), that is well soluble in aqueous medium and totally unreactive towards selected model biomolecules until its reduction. The highlight of this work is the rapid and efficient photoreduction of 1 with visible light (460 nm), which leads to its reactive Pt(II) analogue. This behavior was made possible by taking advantage of an efficient catalytic system based on flavin and NADH, which is naturally present in the cellular environment. As a comparison, the reduction of 1 was also studied with simple UV irradiation, but both UV-Vis spectrophotometry and 1 H-NMR spectrometry showed that the flavin-catalyzed reduction with visible light was faster. Lastly, the reactivity against two representative biological targets, i.e., human serum albumin and one monofilament oligonucleotide fragment, was evaluated by high-resolution mass spectrometry. The results clearly pointed out that the prodrug 1 did not interact with these targets until its photoreduction to the Pt(II) analogue.

High-speed atomic force microscopes (HS-AFMs) with high temporal resolution enable dynamic phenomena to be visualized at nanoscale resolution. However, HS-AFMs are more complex and costlier than conventional AFMs, and particulars of an open-source HS-AFM controller have not been published before. These high entry barriers hinder the popularization of HS-AFMs in both academic and industrial applications. In addition, HS-AFMs generally have a small imaging area that limits the fields of implementation. This study presents an open-source controller that enables a low-cost simplified AFM to achieve a maximum tip-sample velocity of 5,093 µm/s (9.3 s/frame, 512 × 512 pixels), which is nearly 100 times higher than that of the original controller. Moreover, the proposed controller doubles the imaging area to 46.3 × 46.3 µm 2 compared to that of the original system. The low-cost HS-AFM can successfully assess the severity of atopic dermatitis (AD) by measuring the nanotexture of human skin corneocytes in constant height DC mode. The open-source controller-based HS-AFM system costs less than $4,000, which provides resource-limited research institutes with affordable access to high-throughput nanoscale imaging to further expand the HS-AFM research community., Competing Interests: The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: The author Dr. En-Te Hwu was a technical consultant of the simplified AFM company (Strømlinet Nano). This does not affect his adherence to scientific standards., (© 2022 The Author(s).)

Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) is characterized by aberrant extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition, activation of fibroblasts to myofibroblasts and parenchymal disorganization, which have an impact on the biomechanical traits of the lung. In this context, the balance between matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and their tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) is lost. Interestingly, several MMPs are overexpressed during PF and exhibit a clear profibrotic role (MMP-2, -3, -8, -11, -12 and -28), but a few are antifibrotic (MMP-19), have both profibrotic and antifibrotic capacity (MMP7), or execute an unclear (MMP-1, -9, -10, -13, -14) or unknown function. TIMPs are also overexpressed in PF; hence, the modulation and function of MMPs and TIMP are more complex than expected. EMMPRIN/CD147 (also known as basigin) is a transmembrane glycoprotein from the immunoglobulin superfamily (IgSF) that was first described to induce MMP activity in fibroblasts. It also interacts with other molecules to execute non-related MMP aactions well-described in cancer progression, migration, and invasion. Emerging evidence strongly suggests that CD147 plays a key role in PF not only by MMP induction but also by stimulating fibroblast myofibroblast transition. In this review, we study the structure and function of MMPs, TIMPs and CD147 in PF and their complex crosstalk between them.

A large variety of recently predicted and synthesized 2D materials significantly broaden the capabilities of magnetic interface design for spintronic applications. Their diverse structural and electronic properties allow fine adjustment of interfacial interactions between the electrode and spacer materials providing robust and effective spin transport. Based on recent experimental results, here we present a theoretical study of novel interfaces formed by a half-metallic Co 2 FeGe 1/2 Ga 1/2 (CFGG) substrate with h-BN or MoSe 2 monolayer on its top. By means of the DFT approach, the structural, magnetic and electronic properties are studied for the Co- and FeGeGa termination of the CFGG surface. The observed large spin polarization in the vicinity of the interface and robust magnetization exhibit the potential of 2D materials/CFGG heterostructures for spintronic applications.