Carbon nanomaterials with small size and unique optical properties have attracted intensive interest for their promising biomedical applications. In this work, glucose-derived carbonaceous nanospheres (CNSs) with high photothermal conversion efficiency up to 35.1% are explored for the first time as a novel carbon-based theranostic agent. Different from most other carbon nanomaterials, the obtained CNSs are highly biocompatible and nontoxic because of their intrinsic hydrophilic property and the use of glucose as raw materials. Under near-infrared laser irradiation (808 nm, 6 W cm(-2)) for 10 min, less than 15% of PC-3M-IE8 cells exposed to CNSs aqueous dispersions (0.16 mg/mL) remained alive. After intravenous administration of CNSs aqueous dispersions into nude mice, the photoacoustic intensity of the tumor region is about 2.5 times higher than that of preinjection. These results indicate that CNSs are suitable for simultaneous photoacoustic imaging and photothermal ablation of cancer cells and can serve as promising biocompatible carbon-based agents for further clinical trials.

Specificity protein (Sp1) plays an important role in invasion-metastasis cascade. Sp1 regulation on protein coding genes has been extensively investigated; however, little is known about its regulation on protein non-coding genes. In this study, miR-3178 is reported as a novel target of Sp1 in multiple cancer cell models. Sp1 functions as its transcriptional suppressor as evidenced by luciferase reporter and chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays. In line with the pro-metastatic role of Sp1, miR-3178 exerts anti-metastasis function. Overexpression of miR-3178 inhibits both migration and invasion of highly metastatic prostate, lung, and breast cancer cells whereas antagonizing miR-3178 promotes those events in their lowly metastatic counterparts. The in vivo study demonstrates that miR-3178 suppresses the tail vein inoculated prostate cancer cells to form colonies in lung, lymph node, and liver of BALB/c nude mice. miR-3178 directly targets the 3′ UTR of TRIOBP-1 and TRIOBP-5, two isoforms of TRIOBP expressed in prostate, lung, and breast cancer cells. Overexpression of TRIOBP-1 could rescue miR-3178 inhibition on cell migration and invasion. Collectively, our findings reveal the regulatory axis of Sp1/miR-3178/TRIOBP in metastasis cascade. Our results suggest miR-3178 as a promising application to suppress metastasis in Sp1-overexpressed cancers.

This work investigates three‐dimensional accurate guidance problem in the presence of impact angle constraint, input saturation, autopilot lag, and external disturbance, and presents a robust adaptive guidance method for maneuvering targets. More specifically, based on integral Lyapunov control algorithm, a robust guidance law, which can drive both terminal line‐of‐sight angle error and its rate to a small region around zero, while resisting the terrible influence caused by external disturbance, is proposed in this work. To deal with input saturation, guidance command is separated into two parts: real input and saturation error, and an adaptive control technique is employed to compensate the influence resulting from external disturbance and saturation error. Moreover, regarding autopilot lag as a first‐order dynamics, a backstepping designed controller with an adaptive term is proposed. Numerical simulations are carried out and their results demonstrate the proposed properties.