In the field of tissue engineering, polymeric materials with high biocompatibility like polylactic acid and polyglycolic acid have been widely used for fabricating living constructs. For hypopharynx tissue engineering, skeletal muscle is one important functional part of the whole organ, which assembles the unidirectionally aligned myotubes. In this study, a polyurethane (PU) scaffold with microchannel patterns was used to provide aligning guidance for the seeded human myoblasts. Due to the low hydrophilicity of PU, the scaffold was grafted with silk fibroin (PU-SF) or gelatin (PU-Gel) to improve its cell adhesion properties. Scaffolds were observed to degrade slowly over time, and their mechanical properties and hydrophilicities were improved through the surface grafting. Also, the myoblasts seeded on PU-SF had the higher proliferative rate and better differentiation compared with those on the control or PU-Gel. Our results demonstrate that polyurethane scaffolds seeded with myoblasts hold promise to guide hypopharynx muscle regeneration.

Cervical cancer (CC) is the second most common tumor in women worldwide. Studies have been accepted that genetic variations play an important role in the development of CC. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of TCF7L1 variants on CC risk.

To investigate the association between programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) coupled with CD8+ tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILS) and the clinicopathological features, along with prognosis of cervical squamous cell carcinoma (CSCC).

Porous polymeric scaffolds have been much investigated and applied in the field of tissue engineering research. Poly(ester urethane) (PEU) scaffolds, comprising pores of 1-20  μ m in diameter on one surface and ≥ 200 μ m on the opposite surface and in bulk, were fabricated using phase separation method for hypopharyngeal tissue engineering. The scaffolds were grafted with silk fibroin (SF) generated from natural silkworm cocoon to enhance the scaffold's hydrophilicity and further improve cytocompatibility to both primary epithelial cells (ECs) and fibroblasts of human hypopharynx tissue. Coculture of ECs and fibroblasts was conducted on the SF-grafted PEU scaffold (PEU-SF) to evaluate its in vitro cytocompatibility. After co-culture for 14 days, ECs were lined on the scaffold surface while fibroblasts were distributed in scaffold bulk. The results of in vivo investigation showed that PEU porous scaffold possessed good biocompatibility after it was grafted by silk fibroin. SF grafting improved the cell/tissue infiltration into scaffold bulk. Thus, PEU-SF porous scaffold is expected to be a good candidate to support the hypopharynx regeneration.

To identify the optimal diffusion-weighted MRI-derived parameters for predicting the response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in locally advanced rectal cancer.