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Received — 8 April 2026 ⏭
Received — 6 April 2026 ⏭

Unmasking FCGR2B as a high-grade serous ovarian cancer specific marker of immune suppression and tumor progression through multi-omics mining

✇(Multiomics OR Omics) AND (Pancreatic)
By: Jialu Zhou · Tao Zeng · Mingxia Ye · Mingxia Li · Liang Wen · Xinyi Liu · Zhe Zhang · Yuanguang Meng
4 April 2026 at 18:00

Transl Oncol. 2026 Apr 3;67:102748. doi: 10.1016/j.tranon.2026.102748. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) encompasses five major histological subtypes with marked genetic, immunological, and clinical heterogeneity. While genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified subtype-specific risk loci, a critical gap remains in understanding how plasma proteins influence immune-cell traits and contribute to EOC pathogenesis.

METHODS: We integrated subtype-stratified GWAS data from two EOC cohorts with plasma proteomics and immune-cell traits to construct protein-immune-EOC regulatory landscapes using a three-stage Mendelian randomization framework. Single-cell RNA-seq and multiplex immunofluorescence were employed to delineate the cellular distribution and spatial context of causal proteins. Subsequent analyses characterized immune infiltration, macrophage polarization, and clinicopathological associations. Drug-gene correlations were used to identify potential therapeutic targets, and transcriptomic analyses were applied to delineate the underlying transcriptional landscape.

RESULTS: We identified 20 subtype-specific protein-immune-EOC regulatory axes, with FCGR2B emerging as a causal plasma protein in immune regulation and high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) progression. FCGR2B was highly expressed in tumor-associated macrophages and was associated with an M2-like polarization phenotype. Functional characterization revealed that FCGR2B was associated with shorter progression-free survival and an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Transcriptomic analyses revealed altered NF-κB signaling upon FCGR2B knockdown, and drug-response data suggested a potential association between high FCGR2B expression and sensitivity to NF-κB inhibitors.

CONCLUSIONS: These findings delineate subtype-specific genetically informed protein-immune regulatory landscapes in EOC and identify FCGR2B as a key immunoregulatory and prognostic biomarker in HGSOC, suggesting FCGR2B as a potential therapeutic vulnerability that warrants further investigation.

PMID:41934917 | DOI:10.1016/j.tranon.2026.102748

Received — 2 April 2026 ⏭

Elevation of Liver Elastic Value Following Radiofrequency Ablation Reflected Neutrophils Mediated Abscopal Effect in Liver Cancer

✇Omics in Hepatocellular
By: Ke Lin · Jiayao Huang · Nan Zhang · Bin Qiao · Daopeng Yang · Jianping Guo · Xiaoyan Xie · Manxia Lin · Bowen Zhuang
25 March 2026 at 18:00

JHEP Rep. 2026 Mar 23:101824. doi: 10.1016/j.jhepr.2026.101824. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality globally. Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is a widely used treatment for HCC, but its efficacy is often limited by tumor relapse. Neutrophils, serve as a double-edged sword in tumor immunology, have recently been implicated in anti-tumor immunity post-RFA. Shear wave elastography (SWE) is a non-invasive examination for liver tissue, and associated with immune response. This study investigates the correlation between dynamic change of SWE values and neutrophils response following RFA, and explores potential adjuvant strategies for RFA.

METHODS: We conducted a comprehensive analysis using both clinical data from patients undergoing RFA (n=102) and experimental studies in mouse models (n=4-6 per group). Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and multi-omics analyses including multiplex immunofluorescence staining and flow cytometric analysis were performed to identify neutrophil subsets. To assess the therapeutic potential of neutrophils-activating therapy for enhancing anti-tumor immunity post-RFA, we tested CD40 agonist in combination with RFA in preclinical models.

RESULTS: We noticed that rising liver SWE values following RFA were significantly associated with reduce relapse (n=102, p<0.001), and demonstrated that this phenomenon was linked to the inflammatory environment induced by the infiltration of neutrophils (2.5-fold increase, p<0.001). scRNA-seq analysis identified neutrophil subsets characterized by high expression of interferon-stimulated genes, which exhibited potent anti-tumor activity via nitric oxide. Importantly, treatment with CD40 agonist significantly augmented this immune response, leading to reduced tumor growth in mice (149.6±38.12 mm3 vs 23.92±4.43 mm3, p=0.008).

CONCLUSIONS: We linked clinical features to neutrophil-mediated immunity post-RFA. Neutrophil-activating therapy like CD40 agonists may prevent HCC relapse after RFA.

PMID:41881314 | DOI:10.1016/j.jhepr.2026.101824

Received — 26 March 2026 ⏭

Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Zeping Li · Hongru Wang · Yiwen Zhao · Guanhua Chen · Yixia Li · Keyang Chen · Yixin Cao · Guangnan Ye · Hongfeng Chai · Zhenfei Yin
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2602.02050v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool calls, increasing latency and degrading inference performance, making managing tool-use behavior challenging. In this work, we conduct entropy-based pilot experiments and observe a strong positive correlation between entropy reduction and high-quality tool calls. Building on this finding, we propose using entropy reduction as a supervisory signal and design two reward strategies to address the differing needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. Sparse outcome rewards provide coarse, trajectory-level guidance to improve efficiency, while dense process rewards offer fine-grained supervision to enhance performance. Experiments across diverse domains show that both reward designs improve tool-use behavior: the former reduces tool calls by 72.07% compared to the average of baselines, while the latter improves performance by 22.27%. These results position entropy reduction as a key mechanism for enhancing tool-use behavior, enabling agents to be more adaptive in real-world applications.

LoD-Loc v3: Generalized Aerial Localization in Dense Cities using Instance Silhouette Alignment

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Shuaibang Peng · Juelin Zhu · Xia Li · Kun Yang · Maojun Zhang · Yu Liu · Shen Yan
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.19609v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present LoD-Loc v3, a novel method for generalized aerial visual localization in dense urban environments. While prior work LoD-Loc v2 achieves localization through semantic building silhouette alignment with low-detail city models, it suffers from two key limitations: poor cross-scene generalization and frequent failure in dense building scenes. Our method addresses these challenges through two key innovations. First, we develop a new synthetic data generation pipeline that produces InsLoD-Loc - the largest instance segmentation dataset for aerial imagery to date, comprising 100k images with precise instance building annotations. This enables trained models to exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization capability. Second, we reformulate the localization paradigm by shifting from semantic to instance silhouette alignment, which significantly reduces pose estimation ambiguity in dense scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoD-Loc v3 outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, achieving superior performance in both cross-scene and dense urban scenarios with a large margin. The project is available at https://nudt-sawlab.github.io/LoD-Locv3/.
Received — 14 March 2026 ⏭

Effect of a Digital-Driven Physician-Pharmacist Collaborative Model for Diabetes in Primary Health Care: Cluster Randomized Trial

✇Journal of Medical Internet Research
By: Jie Xiao · Qing Wang · Shenglan Tan · Lei Chen · Daxiong Xiang · Haiyan Yuan · Xia Li · Shuting Huang · Bingjie Tang · Yan Guo · Haiying Huang · Danhui Zhao · Yue Li · Li Wang · Qun Li · Juan Liu · Ping Xu
14 March 2026 at 03:00
Background: Evidence-based physician-pharmacist collaborative clinics have demonstrated significant short-term benefits for patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D), but their long-term effectiveness remains unclear, especially in primary health care settings. Objective: This study aimed to explore the long-term effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a novel, digital-driven, multifaceted physician-pharmacist collaborative model for managing patients with T2D in underresourced settings. Methods: We conducted a 12-month cluster randomized controlled trial from May 2021 to December 2022 across 6 primary health care settings in China. Guided by the theory of planned behavior, the intervention involved routine therapy from physicians along with pharmaceutical interventions from pharmacists. These were delivered through a combination of face-to-face visits and mobile health care. The intervention group received 4 face-to-face visits and biweekly remote education sessions over the 12 months. We conducted intention-to-treat analyses to estimate differences in clinical and behavior indicators between the intervention and control groups. Primary outcomes included glycosylated hemoglobin and 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk. Data were analyzed using adjusted generalized estimation equations. Results: This study included 574 patients (291 in the intervention group and 283 in the control group). Over 12 months, patients in the intervention group had significant reductions in hemoglobin A1c (–2.57 vs –1.96, respectively; P<.001; 95% CI –1.027 to –0.238) and 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk (–1.35 vs 0.01, respectively; P<.001; 95% CI –1.690 to –0.630) compared with the control group. Substantial improvements were also observed in several secondary outcomes, including fasting blood glucose, 2-hour postprandial blood glucose, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, triglyceride, and total cholesterol. Total diabetes-related costs decreased, and patient satisfaction improved significantly in the intervention group. There were no significant differences in BMI, high-density lipoprotein, or low-density lipoprotein. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the physician-pharmacist collaborative model could improve the long-term quality and efficiency of T2D management and reduce medical costs in underresourced areas globally. Patients with T2D, especially those with central obesity or high cardiovascular risk, may benefit more from collaborative clinics. Trial Registration: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2000031839; https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=51910
Received — 11 March 2026 ⏭
Received — 25 February 2026 ⏭

AI-driven Large-scale Electron Microscopy enables Whole-tissue Subcellular Digitization

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Li Xiao · Liqing Liu · Hongjun Wu · Jiayi Zhong · Xixia Li · Yan Zhang · Junjie Hu · Sun Fei · Ge Yang · Tao Xu
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2511.02860v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The distribution and interactions of cellular organelles play a critical role in mediating cellular physiology and pathology. Large-scale electron microscopy enables visualization of organelle distribution and interactions at the tissue level with nanometer resolution, but robust and efficient computational analysis tools are lacking. Here, we present a deep learning tool for universal large-scale 2D/3D electron microscopy analysis, DeepOrganelle. This new tool enables high-throughput, cell-resolved spatiotemporal mapping and digitization of organelle distribution and interactions. When applied to spermatogenesis across 12 stages and 22 differentiation status of the germ cells, DeepOrganelle uncovered previously unrecognized, stage-dependent dynamics of mitochondria-endoplasmic reticulum contact sites within one subphase of prophase I during meiosis. It also revealed coordinated organelle redistribution in Sertoli cells towards the blood-testis barrier, digitizing the remodeling dynamics of the tissue. This study demonstrates that DeepOrganelle provides a powerful framework that captures subcellular dynamics at the whole-tissue level.
Received — 17 February 2026 ⏭

PT-RAG: Structure-Fidelity Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Academic Papers

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Rui Yu · Tianyi Wang · Ruixia Liu · Yinglong Wang
17 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.13647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is increasingly applied to question-answering over long academic papers, where accurate evidence allocation under a fixed token budget is critical. Existing approaches typically flatten academic papers into unstructured chunks during preprocessing, which destroys the native hierarchical structure. This loss forces retrieval to operate in a disordered space, thereby producing fragmented contexts, misallocating tokens to non-evidential regions under finite token budgets, and increasing the reasoning burden for downstream language models. To address these issues, we propose PT-RAG, an RAG framework that treats the native hierarchical structure of academic papers as a low-entropy retrieval prior. PT-RAG first inherits the native hierarchy to construct a structure-fidelity PaperTree index, which prevents entropy increase at the source. It then designs a path-guided retrieval mechanism that aligns query semantics to relevant sections and selects high relevance root-to-leaf paths under a fixed token budget, yielding compact, coherent, and low-entropy retrieval contexts. In contrast to existing RAG approaches, PT-RAG avoids entropy increase caused by destructive preprocessing and provides a native low-entropy structural basis for subsequent retrieval. To assess this design, we introduce entropy-based structural diagnostics that quantify retrieval fragmentation and evidence allocation accuracy. On three academic question-answering benchmarks, PT-RAG achieves consistently lower section entropy and evidence alignment cross entropy than strong baselines, indicating reduced context fragmentation and more precise allocation to evidential regions. These structural advantages directly translate into higher answer quality.
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