Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC) and squamous thyroid carcinoma (STC) are both rare and advanced thyroid malignancies with a very poor prognosis and an average median survival time of 5 months and less than 20% of affected patients are alive 1 year after diagnosis. The clinical management of both ATC and STC is very similar because they are not particularly responsive to radiotherapy and chemotherapy. This inspired us to explore a novel and effective clinically approved therapy for ATC treatment. Histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi) drugs are recently FDA-approved drug for malignancies, especially for blood cell cancers. Therefore, we investigated whether an HDACi drug acts as an effective anticancer drug for advanced thyroid cancers. Cell viability analysis of panobinostat treatment demonstrated a significant IC50 of 0.075 µM on SW579 STC cells. In addition, panobinostat exposure activated histone acetylation and triggered cell death mainly through cell cycle arrest and apoptosis-related protein activation. Using CRISPR/Cas9 to knock out HDAC1 and HDAC2 genes in SW579 cells, we observed that the histone acetylation level and cell cycle arrest were enhanced without any impact on cell growth. Furthermore, HDAC1 and HDAC2 double knockout (KO) cells showed dramatic cell apoptosis activation compared to HDAC1 and HDAC2 individual KO cells. This suggests expressional and biofunctional compensation between HDAC1 and HDAC2 on SW579 cells. This study provides strong evidence that panobinostat can potentially be used in the clinic of advanced thyroid cancer patients.
Film Bulk Acoustic Wave Resonators (FBAR) at 2.6GHz using AlN piezoelectric material have been fabricated and characterized in this work. A stack of Al bottom electrode, AlN layer and top Al electrode is used to excite the thickness extensional (TE) vibration mode. The FBAR resonator has a quality factor of about 400 and the piezoelectric coupling coefficient of 4.25%, which is critical for RF filter implementation. Moreover, FBAR resonator has been designed to suppress spurious modes in order to ensure higher quality factor. Different filter topologies of ladder/lattice architecture are then explored for effective implementation using several FBAR resonators to build band-pass RF filters.
In this paper, a tilt sensing mechanism based on the capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducers (CMUTs) is presented. By measuring the difference in the time of flight of various pulse-echo signals from different CMUT transmitting elements to one common receiving element in the oil bath, the tilt angle of the oil surface can be determined. With the proposed device, the maximum tilt angles of 20° and 28° have been measured in the clockwise and counterclockwise directions, respectively, and the difference between the measured and the theoretical values of the tilt angle was found to be within 0.05° during the whole test.
This paper presents an effective evaluation of piezoelectric coefficients (d31 and d33) and other mechanical properties of AlN thin films using resonator structures fabricated on a single wafer. The extracted value for d31 is 1.60pm/V and the d33 value is 3.15pm/V, which are comparable to the coefficient values published in literature. Fabrication of these resonator structures is straightforward and can be incorporated with other more complex steps. Hence, these resonators can serve as an excellent test structures to evaluate and predict the quality of AlN growth and piezoelectric properties of thin AlN films.
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