Nanjing Medical University

About: Nanjing Medical University is a education organization based out in Nanjing, China. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Cancer & Cell growth. The organization has 52221 authors who have published 37904 publications receiving 635831 citations. The organization is also known as: National Jiangsu Medical College & Nanjing Medical College.

The gluconeogenic enzyme PCK1 phosphorylates INSIG1/2 for lipogenesis

Abstract: Cancer cells increase lipogenesis for their proliferation and the activation of sterol regulatory element-binding proteins (SREBPs) has a central role in this process. SREBPs are inhibited by a complex composed of INSIG proteins, SREBP cleavage-activating protein (SCAP) and sterols in the endoplasmic reticulum. Regulation of the interaction between INSIG proteins and SCAP by sterol levels is critical for the dissociation of the SCAP–SREBP complex from the endoplasmic reticulum and the activation of SREBPs1,2. However, whether this protein interaction is regulated by a mechanism other than the abundance of sterol—and in particular, whether oncogenic signalling has a role—is unclear. Here we show that activated AKT in human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells phosphorylates cytosolic phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase 1 (PCK1), the rate-limiting enzyme in gluconeogenesis, at Ser90. Phosphorylated PCK1 translocates to the endoplasmic reticulum, where it uses GTP as a phosphate donor to phosphorylate INSIG1 at Ser207 and INSIG2 at Ser151. This phosphorylation reduces the binding of sterols to INSIG1 and INSIG2 and disrupts the interaction between INSIG proteins and SCAP, leading to the translocation of the SCAP–SREBP complex to the Golgi apparatus, the activation of SREBP proteins (SREBP1 or SREBP2) and the transcription of downstream lipogenesis-related genes, proliferation of tumour cells, and tumorigenesis in mice. In addition, phosphorylation of PCK1 at Ser90, INSIG1 at Ser207 and INSIG2 at Ser151 is not only positively correlated with the nuclear accumulation of SREBP1 in samples from patients with HCC, but also associated with poor HCC prognosis. Our findings highlight the importance of the protein kinase activity of PCK1 in the activation of SREBPs, lipogenesis and the development of HCC. Phosphorylation of INSIG1 and INSIG2 by PCK1 leads to a reduction in the binding of sterols, the activation of SREBP1 and SREBP2 and the downstream transcription of lipogenesis-associated genes that promote tumour growth.

Long noncoding RNA HULC is a novel biomarker of poor prognosis in patients with pancreatic cancer

Abstract: Pancreatic cancer (PC) is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related mortalities in the USA and the sixth leading cause of mortality in China. Recent studies have shown that lncRNAs play important roles in carcinogenesis. The aim of this study was to explore the role of lncRNA HULC in PC. Quantitative real-time PCR was performed to investigate the expression of HULC in tumor tissues and corresponding normal tissues from 304 patients with PC. The higher expression of HULC was significantly correlated with large tumor size, advanced lymph node metastasis and vascular invasion. Multivariate analyses revealed that HULC expression served as an independent predictor for overall survival (P = 0.032). Further experiments revealed that HULC knockdown significantly repressed cell proliferation of PC in vitro. In conclusion, our results suggest that HULC may serve as a candidate prognostic biomarker through growth regulation in human PC.

Oral Tetra-Arsenic Tetra-Sulfide Formula Versus Intravenous Arsenic Trioxide As First-Line Treatment of Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia: A Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract: Purpose This randomized, multicenter, phase III noninferiority trial was designed to test the efficacy and safety of an oral tetra-arsenic tetra-sulfide (As4S4) – containing formula named the Realgar-Indigo naturalis formula (RIF) compared with intravenous arsenic trioxide (ATO) as both induction and maintenance therapies for newly diagnosed acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL).

Alcoholism Detection by Data Augmentation and Convolutional Neural Network with Stochastic Pooling

Abstract: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is an important brain disease. It alters the brain structure. Recently, scholars tend to use computer vision based techniques to detect AUD. We collected 235 subjects, 114 alcoholic and 121 non-alcoholic. Among the 235 image, 100 images were used as training set, and data augmentation method was used. The rest 135 images were used as test set. Further, we chose the latest powerful technique-convolutional neural network (CNN) based on convolutional layer, rectified linear unit layer, pooling layer, fully connected layer, and softmax layer. We also compared three different pooling techniques: max pooling, average pooling, and stochastic pooling. The results showed that our method achieved a sensitivity of 96.88%, a specificity of 97.18%, and an accuracy of 97.04%. Our method was better than three state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, stochastic pooling performed better than other max pooling and average pooling. We validated CNN with five convolution layers and two fully connected layers performed the best. The GPU yielded a 149× acceleration in training and a 166× acceleration in test, compared to CPU.