Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally. piRNAs, which are a novel type of identified small noncoding RNA (ncRNA), play a crucial role in cancer genomics. In recent years, a relatively large number of studies have demonstrated that several piRNA are aberrantly expressed in various kinds of cancers including gastric cancer, bladder cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer and Lung cancer and may probably serve as a novel therapeutic target and biomarker for cancer treatment. The present review summarized current advances in our knowledge of the roles of piRNAs in cancer.

Cancer is a major burden of disease worldwide with considerable impact on society. The tide of immunotherapy has finally changed after decades of disappointing results and has become a clinically validated treatment for many cancers. Immunotherapy takes many forms in cancer treatment, including the adoptive transfer of ex vivo activated T cells, oncolytic viruses, natural killer cells, cancer vaccines and administration of antibodies or recombinant proteins that either costimulate cells or block the so-called immune checkpoint pathways. Recently, cancer immunotherapy has received a high degree of attention, which mainly contains the treatments for programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1), programmed death 1 (PD-1), chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 (CTLA-4). Here, this paper reviewed the current understandings of the main strategies in cancer immunotherapy (adoptive cellular immunotherapy, immune checkpoint blockade, oncolytic viruses and cancer vaccines) and discuss the progress in the synergistic design of immune-targeting combination therapies.

Viral hepatitis, the most common cause of inflammatory liver disease, affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It is most commonly associated with one of the five nominal hepatitis viruses (hepatitis A–E viruses). HBV and HCV can cause acute infections and lifelong, persistent chronic infections, while HAV and HEV cause self-limiting acute infections. HAV and HEV are predominantly transmitted through the fecal-oral route, while diseases transmitted by the other forms are blood-borne diseases. Despite the success in the treatment of viral hepatitis and the development of HAV and HBV vaccines, there is still no accurate diagnosis at the genetic level for these diseases. Timely diagnosis of viral hepatitis is a prerequisite for efficient therapeutic intervention. Due to the specificity and sensitivity of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated sequences (Cas) technology, it has the potential to meet critical needs in the field of diagnosis of viral diseases and can be used in versatile point-of-care (POC) diagnostic applications to detect viruses with both DNA and RNA genomes. In this review, we discuss recent advances in CRISPR–Cas diagnostics tools and assess their potential and prospects in rapid and effective strategies for the diagnosis and control of viral hepatitis infection.