No abstract

Although radiotherapy is effective in managing abdominal and pelvic malignant tumors, radiation enteropathy is still unavoidable. This disease severely affects the quality of life of cancer patients due to some refractory lesions, such as intestinal ischemia, mucositis, ulcer, necrosis or even perforation. Current drugs or prevailing therapies are committed to alleviating the symptoms induced by above lesions. But the efficacies achieved by these interventions are still not satisfactory, because the milieus for tissue regeneration are not distinctly improved. In recent years, regenerative therapy for radiation enteropathy by using mesenchymal stem cells is of public interests. Relevant results of preclinical and clinical studies suggest that this regenerative therapy will become an attractive tool in managing radiation enteropathy, because mesenchymal stem cells exhibit their pro-regenerative potentials for healing the injuries in both epithelium and endothelium, minimizing inflammation and protecting irradiated intestine against fibrogenesis through activating intrinsic repair actions. In spite of these encouraging results, whether mesenchymal stem cells promote tumor growth is still an issue of debate. On this basis, we will discuss the advances in anticancer therapy by using mesenchymal stem cells in this review after analyzing the pathogenesis of radiation enteropathy, introducing the advances in managing radiation enteropathy using regenerative therapy and exploring the putative actions by which mesenchymal stem cells repair intestinal injuries. At last, insights gained from the potential risks of mesenchymal stem cell-based therapy for radiation enteropathy patients may provide clinicians with an improved awareness in carrying out their studies.

High quality ZnO films have been successfully grown on a Si (100) substrate by metal organic chemical vapour deposition with a γ-Al2O3 buffer. The crystal structure, surface morphology and optical properties of the ZnO films were characterized by x-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The properties of the films with the Al2O3 buffer were improved in comparison with those of as-grown ZnO films. It is shown that the ZnO films with the γ-Al2O3 buffer grown on Si (100) substrates have a highly-preferential c-axis (0002) orientation, a narrow (0002) peak, smooth surface morphology and better PL spectral properties. This demonstrates that the use of γ-Al2O3/Si as a ZnO substrate is beneficial for reducing the residual stress for further growth of ZnO films, compared with the growth on bulk Si substrates.

We studied the influence of post-annealing on magnetic and transport properties in Ni 45 Co 5 Mn 36.6 In 13.4 alloys. Our results demonstrate that post-annealing at low temperatures, 300 • C, can lead to a significant change in magnetic properties, martensitic temperature (T M ) and magnetoresistance effect through structure relaxations and possible change in atomic order. It was found that T M shifts from 314 to 283 K but the strong metamagnetic behaviour is still retained when the sample is annealed at 300 • C for 3 h. Thereupon, a large magnetoresistance effect over an extended temperature range can be achieved through controlling the heat treatment conditions. Meanwhile, the thermal stability of the novel composition is also disclosed through the investigations on low temperature annealing effect.