Browsing by Author "Liu, Sheng-Zhi"

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    CXCL13 in Cancer and Other Diseases: Biological Functions, Clinical Significance, and Therapeutic Opportunities
    (MDPI, 2021-11-23) Gao, San-Hui; Liu, Sheng-Zhi; Wang, Gui-Zhen; Zhou, Guang-Biao; Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    The development of cancer is a multistep and complex process involving interactions between tumor cells and the tumor microenvironment (TME). C-X-C chemokine ligand 13 (CXCL13) and its receptor, CXCR5, make crucial contributions to this process by triggering intracellular signaling cascades in malignant cells and modulating the sophisticated TME in an autocrine or paracrine fashion. The CXCL13/CXCR5 axis has a dominant role in B cell recruitment and tertiary lymphoid structure formation, which activate immune responses against some tumors. In most cancer types, the CXCL13/CXCR5 axis mediates pro-neoplastic immune reactions by recruiting suppressive immune cells into tumor tissues. Tobacco smoke and haze (smohaze) and the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene induce the secretion of CXCL13 by lung epithelial cells, which contributes to environmental lung carcinogenesis. Interestingly, the knockout of CXCL13 inhibits benzo(a)pyrene-induced lung cancer and azoxymethane/dextran sodium sulfate-induced colorectal cancer in mice. Thus, a better understanding of the context-dependent functions of the CXCL13/CXCR5 axis in tumor tissue and the TME is required to design an efficient immune-based therapy. In this review, we summarize the molecular events and TME alterations caused by CXCL13/CXCR5 and briefly discuss the potentials of agents targeting this axis in different malignant tumors.
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    Tumor Cell Secretomes in Response to Anti- and Pro-Tumorigenic Agents
    (MDPI, 2021) Liu, Sheng-Zhi; Sun, Xun; Li, Ke-Xin; Lin, Chien-Chi; Na, Sungsoo; Li, Bai-Yan; Yokota, Hiroki; Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Tumor cells regulate their progression not only by the factors within their cell bodies but also by the secretome they produce and secrete. While their secretome significantly alters the fate of tumor cells themselves, they also regulate the growth of surrounding cells including both companion cancer and non-cancer cells. Tumor cell secretome consists of varying molecules that have been reported mostly tumor-promotive. Furthermore, their pro-tumor capability is enhanced by the application of chemotherapeutic agents. However, multiple lines of emerging evidence suggest that the tumor cell secretome can be tumor-suppressive in response to paracrine and endocrine signaling. This review introduces both tumor-promotive and tumor-suppressive secretomes, focusing on multi-tasking proteins in the intracellular and extracellular domains. We describe tumorigenic signaling that governs the nature of the tumor cell secretome and discuss the possibility of inducing tumor-suppressive proteomes as a novel option for cancer treatment. We evaluated the counterintuitive procedure to generate tumor-suppressive proteomes from a unique type of tumor-modifying cells, which are named “induced tumor-suppressing cells” (iTSCs).