Deep-penetration functionalized cuttlefish ink nanoparticles for combating wound infections with synergetic photothermal-immunologic therapy.

The challenge of wound infections post-surgery and open trauma caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria poses a constant threat to clinical treatment. As a promising antimicrobial treatment, photothermal therapy can effectively resolve the problem of drug resistance in conventional antibiotic antimicrobial therapy. Here, we report a deep-penetration functionalized cuttlefish ink nanoparticle (CINP) for photothermal and immunological therapy of wound infections. CINP is decorated with zwitterionic polymer (ZP, namely sulfobetaine methacrylate-methacrylate copolymer) to form CINP@ZP nanoparticles. Natural CINP is found to not only exhibit photothermal destruction of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Escherichia coli (E. coli), but also trigger macrophages-related innate immunity and enhance their antibacterial functions. The ZP coating on the surface of CINP enables nanoparticles to penetrate into deeply infected wound environment. In addition, CINP@ZP is further integrated into the thermosensitive Pluronic F127 gel (CINP@ZP-F127). After in situ spraying gel, CINP@ZP-F127 is also documented notable antibacterial effects in mice wound models infected with MRSA and E. coli. Collectively, this approach combining of photothermal therapy with immunotherapy can promote delivery efficiency of nanoparticles to the deep foci of infective wounds, and effectively eliminate wound infections.

Stemness Subtypes and Scoring System Predict Prognosis and Efficacy of Immunotherapy in Soft Tissue Sarcoma.

Tumor stemness has been reported to play important roles in cancers. However, a comprehensive analysis of tumor stemness remains to be performed to investigate the specific mechanisms and practical values of stemness in soft tissue sarcomas (STS). Here, we applied machine learning to muti-omic data of patients from TCGA-SARC and GSE21050 cohorts to reveal important roles of stemness in STS. We demonstrated limited roles of existing mRNAsi in clinical application. Therefore, based on stemness-related signatures (SRSs), we identified three stemness subtypes with distinct stemness, immune, and metabolic characteristics using consensus clustering. The low-stemness subtype had better prognosis, activated innate and adaptive immunity (e.g., infiltrating B, DC, Th1, CD8+ T, activated NK, gamma delta T cells, and M1 macrophages), more enrichment of metabolic pathways, more sites with higher methylation level, higher gene mutations, CNA burdens, and immunogenicity indicators. Furthermore, the 16 SRS-based stemness prognostic index (SPi) was developed, and we found that low-SPi patients with low stemness had better prognosis and other characteristics similar to those in the low-stemness subtype. Besides, low-stemness subtype and low-SPi patients could benefit from immunotherapy. The predictive value of SPi in immunotherapy was more accurate after the addition of MSI into SPi. MSIlowSPilow patients might be more sensitive to immunotherapy. In conclusion, we highlighted mechanisms and practical values of the stemness in STS. We also recommended the combination of MSI and SPi which is a promising tool to predict prognosis and achieve precise treatments of immunotherapy in STS.

Pseudo in situ construction of high-performance thermoelectric composites with a dioxothiopyrone-based D-A polymer coating on SWCNTs.

Organic polymer/inorganic particle composites with thermoelectric (TE) properties have witnessed rapid progress in recent years. Nevertheless, both development of novel polymers and optimization of compositing methods remain highly desirable. In this study, we first demonstrated a simulated in situ coagulation strategy for construction of high-performance thermoelectric materials by utilizing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) and a new D-A polymer TPO-TTP12 that was synthesized via incorporating dioxothiopyrone subunit into a polymeric chain. It was proven that the preparation methods have a significant influence on thermoelectric properties of the TPO-TTP12/SWCNT composites. The in situ prepared composite films tend to achieve much better thermoelectric performances than those prepared by simply mixing the corresponding polymer with SWCNTs. As a result, the in situ compositing obtains the highest Seebeck coefficient of 66.10 ± 0.05 µV K-1 at the TPO-TTP12-to-SWCNT mass ratio of 1/2, and the best electrical conductivity of up to 500.5 ± 53.3 S cm-1 at the polymer/SWCNT mass ratio of 1/20, respectively; moreover, the power factor for the in situ prepared composites reaches a maximum value of 141.94 ± 1.47 µW m-1 K-2, far higher than that of 104.68 ± 0.86 µW m-1 K-2 for the by-mixing produced composites. This indicates that the dioxothiopyrone moiety is a promising building block for constructing thermoelectric polymers, and the simulated in situ compositing strategy is a promising way to improve TE properties of composite materials.