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Patients with advanced gastric cancer experience rapid disease progression with limited survival, high mortality, and a lack of surgical options. Thus, radiochemotherapy or a combination of chemotherapeutics with targeted therapy is the mainstay of treatment. In comparison to the treatment of other malignant tumors, in gastric cancer, the development of molecularly targeted drugs has been relatively slow. Currently, there are two major classes of molecularly targeted drug regimens that have achieved a certain efficacy in clinical practice: anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) therapy and anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (anti-EGFR) therapy. Trastuzumab has been approved as the standard of care for first-line treatment in advanced human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive gastric cancer. Ramucirumab in combination with paclitaxel is the recommended regimen for second-line treatment, and apatinib is recommended as third-line treatment. This review summarizes the current status of targeted therapies in the treatment of gastric cancer and gives a perspective on the future.

Oxaliplatin is a first-line clinical drug in cancer treatment and its side effects of peripheral neuropathic pain have also attracted much attention. Neuroinflammation induced by oxidative stress-mediated activation of nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) plays an important role in the course. Current studies have shown that curcumin has various biological activities like antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antitumor and so on, while few studies were conducted about its role in oxaliplatin-induced peripheral neuropathic pain. The aim of this study is to verify the mechanism of curcumin alleviating oxaliplatin-induced peripheral neuropathic pain. Intraperitoneal injection with oxaliplatin (4 mg/kg body weight) was given to the rats twice a week and last for four weeks to establish the model rats. Gavage administration of curcumin (12.5, 25, and 50 mg/kg body weight, respectively) was conducted for consecutive 28 d to explore the effects and potential mechanism. Our results showed that curcumin administration could increase mechanical withdrawal threshold and decrease the paw-withdrawal times of cold allodynia significantly; meanwhile, motor nerve conduction velocity (MNCV) and sense nerve conduction velocity (SNCV) were both increased and the injured neurons of the spinal cord were repaired. In addition, curcumin administration increased superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px), catalase (CAT) and reduced malondialdehyde (MDA). Moreover, the curcumin operation inhibited the activated of NF-κB and level of inflammatory factors like tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and interleukin-6 (IL-6). In conclusion, these findings suggested that curcumin could alleviate oxaliplatin-induced peripheral neuropathic pain; the mechanism might be inhibiting oxidative stress-mediated activation of NF-κB and mitigating neuroinflammation.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the most widely used signalling protocol for controlling communication, establishing, maintaining, and terminating sessions on the Internet. However, since sensitive information is often transmitted through open channels, a security authentication scheme is essential. Recently, Islam et al. proposed an authentication scheme for SIP, and argued that the scheme is immune to known attacks. However, we discover that their scheme fails to achieve user anonymity, and it cannot even resist impersonation attack. Therefore, this study proposes an enhanced mutual authentication scheme to eliminate the drawbacks of the scheme proposed by Islam et al. In addition, our proposed scheme is based on extended chaotic map, which avoids computationally expensive elliptic curve point multiplication. Then, we use Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic to prove that the proposed scheme achieves secure mutual authentication, and we use the Real-Or-Random model to analyze the formal security verification of the session key. Finally, we compare the performance and the security features of the proposed scheme with some existing schemes. Therefore, we provide better safety and efficiency than related schemes and the proposed scheme is suitable for SIP.

The advanced encryption standard (AES) is the most encryption algorithm used around the world. This fact made it coveted by several cryptanalysis attacks. Some of them succeed to reveal certain weakness, due to its static parameters known by the public mass. The substitution box (S-Box) is among the most sensitive parameters of this standard, which plays a crucial role in the protection against these attacks. In this study, a new version of AES is introduced, which uses a set of AES-like S-Boxes instead of the original one. These S-Boxes, generated from different irreducible polynomials, are dynamically chosen, depending on the encryption key. This introduction is conducted by the design and the implementation of a new block cipher version of AES, based on a key dependent S-Box cube. Where a cube of six interchangeable S-Boxes key-dependently generated is constructed. This cube determines the active S-Box for a given round, through its random rotations guided by the round key. Furthermore, the improvement of the cryptographic robustness, provided by this method is demonstrated. This is accomplished through a comparison with the original AES, in terms of statistical and cryptographic randomness properties.

Ziyin Huatan Recipe (ZYHT), a traditional Chinese medicine comprised of Lilii Bulbus, Pinelliae Rhizoma, and Hedyotis Diffusa, has shown promise in treating gastric cancer (GC). However, its potential mechanism has not yet been clearly addressed. This study aimed to predict targets and molecular mechanisms of ZYHT in treating GC by network pharmacology analysis and to explore the role of ZYHT in GC both in vitro and in vivo.Targets and molecular mechanisms of ZYHT were predicted via network pharmacology analysis. The effects of ZYHT on the expression of metastasis-associated targets were further validated by Western blot and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. To explore the specific molecular mechanisms of the effects of ZYHT on migration and invasion, the runt-related transcription factor 3 (RUNX3) gene was knocked out by clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/Cas9, and lentiviral vectors were transfected into SGC-7901 cells. Then lung metastasis model of GC in nude mice was established to explore the anti-metastasis effect of ZYHT. Western blot and immunohistochemistry were used to explore the impact of ZYHT on the expression of metastasis-related proteins with or without RUNX3 gene.The network pharmacology analysis showed that ZYHT might inhibit focal adhesion, migration, invasion and metastasis of GC. ZYHT inhibited the proliferation, migration and invasion of GC cells in vitro via regulating the expression of metastasis-associated targets. Knocking out RUNX3 almost completely reversed the cell phenotypes (migration and invasion) and protein expression levels elicited by ZYHT. In vivo studies showed that ZYHT inhibited the metastasis of GC cells to the lung and prolonged the survival time of the nude mice. Knocking out RUNX3 partly reversed the metastasis of GC cells to the lung and the protein expression levels elicited by ZYHT.ZYHT can effectively inhibit the invasion and migration of GC in vitro and in vivo, and its molecular mechanism may relate to the upregulation of RUNX3 expression.

A basic but expensive operation in the implementations of several famous public-key cryptosystems is the computation of the multi-scalar multiplication in a certain finite additive group defined by an elliptic curve. We propose an adaptive window method for the multi-scalar multiplication, which aims to balance the computation cost and the memory cost under register-constrained environments. That is, our method can maximize the computation efficiency of multi-scalar multiplication according to any small, fixed number of registers provided by electronic devices. We further demonstrate that our method is efficient when five registers are available. Our method is further studied in detail in the case where it is combined with the non-adjacent form (NAF) representation and the joint sparse form (JSF) representation. One efficiency result is that our method with the proposed improved NAF n-bit representation on average requires 209n/432 point additions. To the best of our knowledge, this efficiency result is optimal compared with those of similar methods using five registers. Unlike the previous window methods, which store all possible values in the window, our method stores those with comparatively high probabilities to reduce the number of required registers.

As an open standard for the short-range radio frequency communications, Bluetooth is suitable for Mobile Crowdsensing Systems (MCS). However, the massive deployment of personal Bluetooth-enabled devices also raises privacy concerns on their wielders. Hence, we investigate the privacy of the unilateral authentication protocol according to the recent Bluetooth standard v5.2. The contributions of the paper are twofold. (1) We demonstrate that the unilateral authentication protocol suffers from privacy weakness. That is, the attacker is able to identify the target Bluetooth-enabled device once he observed the device’s previous transmitted messages during the protocol run. More importantly, we analyze the privacy threat of the Bluetooth MCS, when the attacker exploits the proposed privacy weakness under the typical Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. (2) An improved unilateral authentication protocol is therefore devised to repair the weakness. Under our formal privacy model, the improved protocol provably solves the traceability problem of the original protocol in the Bluetooth standard. Additionally, the improved protocol can be easily adapted to the Bluetooth standards because it merely employs the basic cryptographic components available in the standard specifications. In addition, we also suggest and evaluate two countermeasures, which do not need to modify the original protocol.

Background/Aims. In previous studies, it has been observed that Xiaotan Jieyu (XTJY) prescription may inhibit the proliferation of human breast precancerous lesion MCF-10AT cells by inhibiting the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway. The purpose of this study is to further verify the therapeutic effect and the possible mechanism of XTJY on precancerous lesions of breast cancer in vivo. Methods. The successfully established breast precancerous lesion rat model and normal healthy rats were randomly assigned into the blank (BLA), model (MOD), XTJY-low (LD), XTJY-medium (MD), XTJY-high (HD), and tamoxifen (TAM) groups. Different concentrations of XTJY and saline were supplied by intragastric administration for 4 consecutive weeks to assess the protective effect of XTJY on the progress of the breast precancerous lesion in rats involving the phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K)/protein kinase B (Akt) signaling pathway. Results. In this study, it determined that 10 mg/each rat DMBA-combined estrogen and progesterone induction for 10 weeks was the optimal condition for the establishment of the breast precancerous lesion rat model. In vivo administration of XTJY or TAM was found to inhibit the development of the breast precancerous lesion, and the occurrence rate of breast invasive carcinomas was decreased by about 50%. Furthermore, XTJY or TAM markedly reduced protein expressions of PI3K and p-Akt and increased protein expressions of PTEN. Conclusion. These data indicated that XTJY can significantly alleviate the development of breast precancerous lesions by inhibiting the activation of the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway. XTJY may be a promising drug for the treatment of precancerous lesions in breast cancer.

Liu et al. proposed a grouping-proof authentication protocol (GUPA) for distributed radio frequency identification systems. At the same time, Liu et al. claimed that GUPA can resist the well-known attacks such as replay, forgery, tracking, and denial of proof. However, we report that, according to Liu et al. ’s assumption of the attack ability, the attacker is able to compromise all secrets by the man-in-the-middle (MIM) attacks. Although the MIM attacks were not explicitly evaluated by GUPA, the attacker can easily launch replay, forgery, tracking, and denial of proof when he knows all secrets of GUPA. That is, the lethal security flaws exist in GUPA. We also suggest employing the cryptographic hash function to protect the secrets in GUPA. Our security analysis of GUPA will be beneficial to the design of the robust grouping-proof authentication protocols in the future.

Multiple direction compression (MDC) was conducted on sintered pure tungsten (99.9%, mass fraction) with different reductions at 1423 K. The microstructure, microhardness and thermal stability of the MDC-processed samples were studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD), electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) compared with those of the initial sintered tungsten. The results show that the dislocation density increases significantly with the reduction of MDC, ranging from 3.08×1014 m–2 for the initial sintered tungsten to 8.08×1014 m–2 for the tungsten after MDC with the reduction of 50%. The average grain size decreases from 83.8 to 14.7 μm and the microhardness value increases from HV0.2 417 to HV0.2 521. The recrystallization temperature for the tungsten samples processed by MDC is approximately constant at around 1600 K. The MDC of sintered tungsten results in a decrease of grain size concurrent with an increase of uniformly distributed nucleation sites, which leads to the improvement of the thermal stability.