Aggregation greatly boosts emission efficiency of the silole, turning it from a weak luminophor into a strong emitter.

Although it is increasingly evident that cancer is influenced by signals emanating from tumor stroma, little is known regarding how changes in stromal gene expression affect epithelial tumor progression. We used laser capture microdissection to compare gene expression profiles of tumor stroma from 53 primary breast tumors and derived signatures strongly associated with clinical outcome. We present a new stroma-derived prognostic predictor (SDPP) that stratifies disease outcome independently of standard clinical prognostic factors and published expression-based predictors. The SDPP predicts outcome in several published whole tumor-derived expression data sets, identifies poor-outcome individuals from multiple clinical subtypes, including lymph node-negative tumors, and shows increased accuracy with respect to previously published predictors, especially for HER2-positive tumors. Prognostic power increases substantially when the predictor is combined with existing outcome predictors. Genes represented in the SDPP reveal the strong prognostic capacity of differential immune responses as well as angiogenic and hypoxic responses, highlighting the importance of stromal biology in tumor progression.

Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are essential in vasculogenesis and wound healing, but their circulating and wound level numbers are decreased in diabetes. This study aimed to determine mechanisms responsible for the diabetic defect in circulating and wound EPCs. Since mobilization of BM EPCs occurs via eNOS activation, we hypothesized that eNOS activation is impaired in diabetes, which results in reduced EPC mobilization. Since hyperoxia activates NOS in other tissues, we investigated whether hyperoxia restores EPC mobilization in diabetic mice through BM NOS activation. Additionally, we studied the hypothesis that impaired EPC homing in diabetes is due to decreased wound level stromal cell-derived factor-1α (SDF-1α), a chemokine that mediates EPC recruitment in ischemia. Diabetic mice showed impaired phosphorylation of BM eNOS, decreased circulating EPCs, and diminished SDF-1α expression in cutaneous wounds. Hyperoxia increased BM NO and circulating EPCs, effects inhibited by the NOS inhibitor N-nitro-l-arginine-methyl ester. Administration of SDF-1α into wounds reversed the EPC homing impairment and, with hyperoxia, synergistically enhanced EPC mobilization, homing, and wound healing. Thus, hyperoxia reversed the diabetic defect in EPC mobilization, and SDF-1α reversed the diabetic defect in EPC homing. The targets identified, which we believe to be novel, can significantly advance the field of diabetic wound healing.

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