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Pancreatic adenocarcinoma has an exceedingly poor prognosis, accounting for five-year survival of less than 5%. Presently, improving the efficacy of pancreatic adenocarcinoma treatment has been the focus of medical researchers worldwide. Recently, it has been suggested that deregulation of interleukin- (IL-) 6 is caused by a key gene involved in the beginning and development of pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Herein, we investigated whether suppression of IL-6 could augment gemcitabine sensitivity in the PANC-1 cells. We found considerably higher expression of IL-6 in pancreatic adenocarcinoma tissues than that in the adjacent nontumorous tissues. Suppression of IL-6 by shRNA resulted in apoptosis as well as inhibition of cell proliferation and tumorigenicity. In addition, suppression of IL-6 remarkably promoted antitumor effect of gemcitabine, indicating that the combination of shRNA targeting IL-6 with gemcitabine may provide a potential clinical approach for pancreatic cancer therapy.

We present an entanglement distillation scheme for enhancing remote two-photon polarization entanglement of mixed states. Although the main idea of the current scheme is based on Gisin׳s work (Phys. Lett. A 210 (1996) 151 [21] ), there are new advantages in our new scheme, which are guaranteed by the nondemolition measurement of photonic state and the re-distillation of the garbage states. This entanglement distillation scheme not only can enhance the remote entanglement of mixed states, but also can expand two-photon entangled states to four-photon entangled states. So this scheme is an apparently feasible way for preparing multi-photon entangled states. The main idea is based on the principle of the cross-Kerr nonlinearity and the parity-check measurements (a nondemolition measurement) on photonic states. Two distant users Alice and Bob first start with one shared but less entangled photon pair, and with the help of local auxiliary photons, parity-check measurements and classical communication they can get a four-photon highly entangled states with a high success probability. For the fail result, although the garbage state is less entangled than the initial one, there is still entanglement in it. So these garbage states can be re-collected and distilled again instead of being discarded. In this sense, we can see that this protocol has a high yield, and the fidelity (with respect to the Bell state) of the initial state is not required to be bigger than 1/2 (a common threshold of the standard entanglement purification theory). In addition, post-selection measurements on the entangled photons are not needed here because of the nondemolition measurement. The nondemolition character of the measurement allows further processing of the resulting states. These advantages make the current scheme more feasible within the current technology.

The objective of the present study was to construct a novel type of non-viral gene delivery vector with high delivery efficiency and specific tumor cell-targeting ability. The CP9 peptide (CYGGRGDTP) containing Arg-Gly-Asp sequence was employed to be conjugated onto polyethylenimine (PEI) to act as the role of the targeting moiety. The chemical linker, N-succinimidyl-3-(2-pyridyldithio) propionate, was applied during the synthesis of the vector (CP9-PEI). The physicochemical characteristics of the vector were evaluated by the methods of 1H-nuclear magnetic resonance, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, gel retardation assay, electron microscope observation and particle size detection. HepG2 cells were used to verify the gene delivery efficiency and targeting ability by gene delivery procedure and free CP9 peptide inhibition tests. The results showed that the successful synthesis of CP9-PEI and the synthesized vector may efficiently condense plasmid DNA into round particles with diameters of ~200 nm at a polymer/pDNA ratio of 10. CP9-PEI may deliver the reporter gene into HepG2 cells with higher efficiency and the efficiency may be inhibited by the free CP9 peptide. The present study suggested that the modification of PEI with the CP9 peptide is an effective method to construct a novel tumor cell-targeting non-viral vector, and that the novel vector exhibits great prospect in the field of cancer gene therapy.

In this work, we study how to distill two typical multipartite entangled noisy states, the amplitude-damped W state and the amplitude-damped Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. Unlike the currently existing multipartite entanglement purification schemes, our scheme is a single-copy-based scheme, i.e., only one noisy state is needed in each distillation round, and the complicated multilateral controlled-not (cnot) operations are replaced by measurements of local positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs). The results show that local POVM measurements on one copy of the noisy state can project the initial state onto a new state with higher entanglement and nonlocality. In this scheme, although the final state can violate the multipartite Bell inequality, the corresponding initial noisy state does not violate it, which means that this distillation scheme can reveal the hidden genuine multipartite nonlocality of these initial states. For the case of the amplitude-damped W state, if the POVM parameters are appropriately chosen, the fidelity of the output state can approach $1.0$ for all the initial states with fidelity bigger than zero. So this single-copy-based multipartite entanglement distillation scheme has a wide range of distillable fidelities, and it is much simpler than the two-copy- or multiple-copy-based schemes. Furthermore, if the POVM measurement is carried out only on some member qubits rather than all of them, the distillation scheme can succeed too, which will greatly decrease the implementation complexity of the scheme. So this multipartite entanglement distillation scheme may be implementable in some physical system.