After enduring intense treatments and a 10-hour surgery as a high school junior to treat a rare form of cancer, Callan currently has no evidence of disease and is a student of fine arts at the University of Texas. Read how his family is helping others diagnosed with this rare cancer.

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In October 2021, Callan began experiencing a mysterious pain in his neck. A talented artist and a good student, Callan had been looking forward to his junior year of high school. After also developing a cough, he was diagnosed with walking pneumonia, but later imaging showed a large tumor in his chest.

Multiple doctors told Callan the tumor, diagnosed as synovial sarcoma, was inoperable. Synovial sarcoma is often deadly without surgery, but his family eventually found a team willing to operate. Callan currently has no evidence of disease.

Callan’s father, Chas, knows few families have time and resources needed to seek different opinions, so he created a Facebook group called “Synovial Sarcoma Families,” which collects and shares data from members about their diagnosis, treatment, outcome, and care teams.

Bendamustine administration within 9 months of apheresis significantly reduced response rates and survival in patients with relapsed/refractory large B-cell lymphoma:

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CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy provides durable responses and a potential cure in approximately one third of patients with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma (R/R LBCL). Although it is known that therapy with the lymphotoxic chemotherapy agent bendamustine, prior to autologous T-cell collection, can impair T-cell number and function, its impact on patient outcomes has not been systematically addressed.

Investigators have now conducted a retrospective, multicenter study of 439 patients with R/R LBCL who had received two or more previous lines of therapy and were infused with commercially available CD19-targeted CAR T cells (axicabtagene ciloleucel or tisagenlecleucel). Of these patients, 80 (18%) had received one or more cycles of bendamustine, including 42 who had been treated within 9 months of apheresis. At baseline, bendamustine-exposed patients, compared with bendamustine-naive patients, were older (66 vs. 61 years), had poorer performance status (1, 16% vs. 7%), were more heavily pretreated (2 previous lines of therapy, 71% vs. 28%), and were more likely to have transformed indolent B-cell lymphoma (45% vs. 15%).

At apheresis, bendamustine-exposed patients, compared with bendamustine-naive patients, had a significantly poorer overall response rate (ORR; 53% vs. 72%; P0.01), shorter progression-free survival (PFS; 3.1 vs. 6.2 months; P0.04), and shorter overall survival (OS; 10.3 vs. 23.5 months; P0.01). For those who received bendamustine within 9 months of apheresis, ORR was even lower (40%), and PFS and OS were shorter (1.3 and 4.6 months, respectively). Bendamustine-exposed patients also had lower absolute lymphocyte counts, lower CD4⁺ T-cell counts, and poorer CAR T-cell expansion, but had similar rates of cytokine release syndrome and immune-effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome.

This research is still in the initial stages and needs further investigation before it becomes part of the pacemakers used today.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle successfully designed a leadless pacemaker that can be partially charged using energy generated by the beating heart. The research findings will be presented at the American Heart Association’s (AHA) Scientific Sessions to be held later this weekend, a press release said.

Pacemakers are small devices that detect a patient’s heartbeat and send electrical pulses to the heart if it needs to be paced. According to the AHA’s report, as many as 93,000 pacemaker and defibrillator procedures were performed in the US in 2018.