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BOSTON - Four years after patients with melanoma were treated with a personalized cancer vaccine, the immune response kindled by the vaccine remains robust and effective in keeping cancer cells under control, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women s Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard report in a new study.
The findings, published online today by the journal
Nature Medicine, demonstrate the staying power of the immune response generated by the vaccine, known as NeoVax, which works by targeting specific proteins on each patient s tumor cells. The researchers found that, nearly four years after vaccination, the patients immune system cells were active not only against tumor cells with those distinctive proteins, but also spread to other proteins found in those patients tumor cells.
Cancer patients and the COVID-19 vaccines
Clinicians, cancer patients and coronavirus researchers weigh in on vaccination safety, timing, allergy concerns and more January 14, 2021 • By Diane Mapes / Fred Hutch News Service Metastatic breast cancer patient and family doctor Dr. Carla Kakuta of Winters, California, receives her first COVID-19 shot, before heading off to cancer treatment. I went straight from vaccination to the infusion center because I’m awesome like that, she wrote on Twitter. “I ve been seeing patients in person through the pandemic. Since Thanksgiving the % positive rate of the people I test has been 15 to 20%. Grateful I’ve been able to avoid bringing it home to my family.
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BY: Prince Acquah
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Free newborn screening for sickle cell disease has been launched at the 37 Military and the Greater Accra Regional (Ridge) Hospitals.
The screening is an initiative of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana (SCFG) being implemented in collaboration with the American Society of Haematology (ASH).
It will be funded from the Consortium on Newborn Screening in Africa for Sickle Cell Disease of ASH.
It is aimed at screening more than 10,000 babies at the facilities annually to improve the health outcomes for infants with sickle cell.
The move also forms part of efforts to expand the National Newborn Screening Programme for Sickle Cell Disease (NNSPSCD), which is ensuring that persons diagnosed with the disease received appropriate health care, including counselling and clinical treatment.
Should patients hospitalized for COVID-19 routinely receive extra anticoagulation or go home with a course of antithrombotics?
The first randomized controlled trial data are still emerging, leaving those questions to the realm of expert consensus statements with only observational and pre-COVID data from which to extrapolate.
The key fulcrum on which the decision rests is how elevated venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk is versus how much bleeding occurs in COVID-19 patients, noted speakers at a Pulmonary Embolism Response Team Consortium webinar on Wednesday.
A widely cited meta-analysis in
CHEST yielded a 17% estimated incidence of VTE across 47 studies in hospitalized COVID-19 patients largely on standard thromboprophylaxis, which individually ranged from 0% to 85%.
Following is a transcript of their remarks:
Vinay Prasad, MD: I m back with Dr. Aaron Goodman and Dr. Al-Ola Abdallah and we re talking about ASH and multiple myeloma. We have an exciting study to discuss, the FORTE study. This is a three-arm study that looks at carfilzomib-containing regimens, which, to my knowledge, is not the official standard of care in multiple myeloma in the frontline setting, although some believe it plays a role, and they ask a very provocative question about the role of transplant and maintenance.
Dr. Goodman, I wonder if you might summarize the FORTE study. What is going on in FORTE, what are we finding, and what should we be thinking about?