Oral cancer is the most common malignancy with poor prognosis and is the fourth most common cancer in men in Taiwan. The tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-3 (TIMP3) acts as a tumor suppressor gene by inhibiting the growth, angiogenesis, migration, and invasion of cancer cells. However, few studies have examined the association of plasma TIMP3 levels with oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), and the role of plasma TIMP3 levels in OSCC progression is still unclear. We measured the plasma TIMP3 levels of 450 OSCC patients and 64 healthy controls by using a commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. We also analyzed TIMP3 mRNA levels of 328 OSCC patients and 32 normal tissues from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset. Our results revealed that plasma TIMP3 levels were significantly lower in patients with OSCC than in healthy controls (p < 0.001). Moreover, plasma TIMP3 levels in patients with OSCC were significantly associated with the tumor stage and tumor status but not with the lymph node status, metastasis, and cell differentiation. To verify our findings, we also examined TCGA bioinformatics database and discovered similar results for the association with the pathological stage of OSCC. In conclusion, our results suggest that plasma TIMP3 is a potential biomarker for predicting the tumor stage and T status in patients with OSCC.

A miniaturized common-mode (CM) filter, implemented by coupled synthesized microstrip lines and modified mushroom resonators, is proposed and validated on a three-layer printed circuit board. Four identical unit cells with synthesis equations are developed and cascaded. According to the experiments, this miniaturized filter provides a good compromise between circuit size and electrical performance; it is the second smallest design ever reported but with better CM suppression and wider differential-mode operating bandwidth.

In this paper, a printed dipole antenna for triband operation is presented. By introducing two pairs of quasilumped LC resonators into a typical dipole antenna operated at 5.2 GHz, the proposed antenna shows two additional bands at 1.75 and 2.35 GHz. The antenna is designed on a low-cost FR4 substrate for the CDMA-2000 (1.71 -1.785 GHz), Wibro (2.3 -2.39 GHz), and 5.2 GHz WLAN (5.15 -5.35 GHz) applications.Index Terms -Tri-band antenna, dipole antenna, planar antennas, LC-loading, quasi-lumped resonator.