mRNA vaccine in cancer therapy: Current advance and future outlook.

Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines are a relatively new class of vaccines that have shown great promise in the immunotherapy of a wide variety of infectious diseases and cancer. In the past 2 years, SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines have contributed tremendously against SARS-CoV2, which has prompted the arrival of the mRNA vaccine research boom, especially in the research of cancer vaccines. Compared with conventional cancer vaccines, mRNA vaccines have significant advantages, including efficient production of protective immune responses, relatively low side effects and lower cost of acquisition. In this review, we elaborated on the development of cancer vaccines and mRNA cancer vaccines, as well as the potential biological mechanisms of mRNA cancer vaccines and the latest progress in various tumour treatments, and discussed the challenges and future directions for the field.

HTCA: a database with an in-depth characterization of the single-cell human transcriptome.

Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) is one of the most used single-cell omics in recent decades. The exponential growth of single-cell data has immense potential for large-scale integration and in-depth explorations that are more representative of the study population. Efforts have been made to consolidate published data, yet extensive characterization is still lacking. Many focused on raw-data database constructions while others concentrate mainly on gene expression queries. Hereby, we present HTCA (www.htcatlas.org), an interactive database constructed based on ∼2.3 million high-quality cells from ∼3000 scRNA-seq samples and comprised in-depth phenotype profiles of 19 healthy adult and matching fetal tissues. HTCA provides a one-stop interactive query to gene signatures, transcription factor (TF) activities, TF motifs, receptor-ligand interactions, enriched gene ontology (GO) terms, etc. across cell types in adult and fetal tissues. At the same time, HTCA encompasses single-cell splicing variant profiles of 16 adult and fetal tissues, spatial transcriptomics profiles of 11 adult and fetal tissues, and single-cell ATAC-sequencing (scATAC-seq) profiles of 27 adult and fetal tissues. Besides, HTCA provides online analysis tools to perform major steps in a typical scRNA-seq analysis. Altogether, HTCA allows real-time explorations of multi-omics adult and fetal phenotypic profiles and provides tools for a flexible scRNA-seq analysis.

Endogenous stimuli-responsive nanoparticles for cancer therapy: From bench to bedside.

Cancer is complicated to treat because of its high propensity for recurrence and metastasis, and various side effects of conventional cancer treatments. With the development of nanotechnology, biology, material science and pharmacy, nanoparticles emerge as a promising method to load anti-cancer drugs to deal with the downsides of conventional treatments. Among the various class of nanoparticles, endogenous stimuli-responsive nanoparticles exert significant anti-cancer effects by releasing drugs due to the stimulations from pH gradient, redox as well as other enzymes of cancer microenvironment. Extraordinary progress has been achieved as the latest endogenous stimuli-responsive nanoparticles exhibit better therapeutic effects, lower toxicity, and superior biocompatibility, indicating brighter prospects for cancer therapy. However, these stimuli-responsive nanoparticles are still not ready for large-scale clinical application, due to reasons such as the lack of clinical trials and high cost of manufacturing. Here, we consolidate the advancements and limitations of various endogenous stimuli-responsive nanoparticles, as well as critically discuss the prospects of this kind of nanoparticles in tumor treatments.