I still think it is a threat globally and it based on many cases globally that still rise at an alarming rate.
Prevalence of a new subvariant of Omicron is increasing, but whether it will cause a big surge in infections or hospitalizations isn’t clear.
Drug companies Moderna and Merck have released encouraging results from a vaccine trial that shows promise in the battle against Stage 3 and Stage 4 melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer. NBC’s Dr. Natalie Azar breaks down the findings on TODAY.
PD-1 inhibitors have been widely used for treatment of multiple types of cancer. 1 With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the effect of anti-COVID-19 vaccination on PD-1 safety and efficacy has become a critical question for oncologists and patients with cancer alike. 2 To avoid potential treatment complications, some physicians have opted to suspend PD-1 inhibitor treatments for recently vaccinated patients with cancer. However, little data exist to support such a decision. Recent studies have found that anti-COVID-19 vaccines such as BNT162b2 (Pfizer BioNTech, New York, New York, USA) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) are well tolerated in patients with cancer, 3–5 and side-effect profiles from these vaccines were similar between healthy volunteers and patients with cancer. 6 One recent meta-analysis summarizing multiple COVID-19 vaccine trials studies concluded that patients with cancer have a significantly lower likelihood of attaining acceptable immune response to COVID-19 immunization when compared with the general population given compromised cancerous immune system. 7 However, whether anti-COVID-19 vaccines have any functional impact on the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatment was unknown. Thus, we conducted a large multicenter study to explore the effects of COVID-19 vaccination on PD-1 inhibitor treatment in patients with cancer.
A total of 3,552 consenting adult patients with cancer were screened from 83 Chinese hospitals and medical centers beginning on January 28, 2021. Eligible participants met the following inclusion criteria: their malignancy had been histopathologically confirmed; they had received at least one dose of camrelizumab8 (one of the most commonly used PD-1 inhibitors in China) after the COVID-19 vaccination program was launched in China in January 2021. Clinical information, demographic data, and medical history were collected at enrollment, and patient treatment, adverse events and outcomes were followed through September 30, 2021. Efficacy and safety of PD-1 treatment were evaluated according to Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumor V.1.19 and National Cancer Institute Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events V.5.0,10 respectively. Patient functionality/performance status was evaluated using Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) criteria.
A collaborative study has found that immunization with the vaccine SinoVac might improve responses to treatment in patients with nasopharyngeal cancer (NPC). The research is published as a “Letter to the Editor” in the journal Annals of Oncology.
Fears that COVID-19 vaccination may interfere with cancer treatment
Cancer cells are clever. They can adapt methods to avoid or divert the body’s immune response to protect their growth and prevent being destroyed. One approach is to target a protein found on T cells called programmed cell death protein 1, or PD-1. When PD-1 is bound to its ligand, PD-L1, it prevents T cells from killing malignant cells. Drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors can block PD-1, releasing the “brakes” on the immune response such that the T cells’ ability to kill cancer cells is unleashed.
Year 2021 😀 😍
The COVID-19 pandemic has reached direct and indirect medical and social consequences with a subset of patients who rapidly worsen and die from severe-critical manifestations. As a result, there is still an urgent need to identify prognostic biomarkers and effective therapeutic approaches. Severe-critical manifestations of COVID-19 are caused by a dysregulated immune response. Immune checkpoint molecules such as Programmed death-1 (PD-1) and its ligand programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) play an important role in regulating the host immune response and several lines of evidence underly the role of PD-1 modulation in COVID-19. Here, by analyzing blood sample collection from both hospitalized COVID-19 patients and healthy donors, as well as levels of PD-L1 RNA expression in a variety of model systems of SARS-CoV-2, including in vitro tissue cultures, ex-vivo infections of primary epithelial cells and biological samples obtained from tissue biopsies and blood sample collection of COVID-19 and healthy individuals, we demonstrate that serum levels of PD-L1 have a prognostic role in COVID-19 patients and that PD-L1 dysregulation is associated to COVID-19 pathogenesis. Specifically, PD-L1 upregulation is induced by SARS-CoV-2 in infected epithelial cells and is dysregulated in several types of immune cells of COVID-19 patients including monocytes, neutrophils, gamma delta T cells and CD4+ T cells. These results have clinical significance since highlighted the potential role of PD-1/PD-L1 axis in COVID-19, suggest a prognostic role of PD-L1 and provide a further rationale to implement novel clinical studies in COVID-19 patients with PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors.
COVID-19 pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) holds the world in thrall since early March 2020. COVID-19 manifests a spectrum of signs and symptoms from mild illness to acute pneumonia. Unfortunately, a considerable percentage of patients rapidly worse to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) requiring intensive care (1, 2).
Understanding the link between patients’ immune features and disease severity represents a crucial step in the war against this pandemic. Severe-critical manifestations of COVID-19 are caused by a dysregulated immune response in which the adaptive immune system, ruled by T and B lymphocytes, plays a fundamental role (3).
Research has found, while AI could lead to the creation of 69 million new jobs worldwide, it could also result in the loss of 83 million existing jobs.
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Alex Jenkin from the WA Data Science Innovation Hub says it’s more likely people will be replaced by someone who can use AI tools like ChatGPT, rather than artificial intelligence itself.
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Artificial intelligence has entered our daily lives. First, it was ChatGPT. Now, it’s AI-generated pizza and beer commercials. While we can’t trust AI to be perfect, it turns out that sometimes we can’t trust ourselves with AI either.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Assistant Professor Peter Koo has found that scientists using popular computational tools to interpret AI predictions are picking up too much “noise,” or extra information, when analyzing DNA. And he’s found a way to fix this. Now, with just a couple new lines of code, scientists can get more reliable explanations out of powerful AIs known as deep neural networks. That means they can continue chasing down genuine DNA features. Those features might just signal the next breakthrough in health and medicine. But scientists won’t see the signals if they’re drowned out by too much noise.
So, what causes the meddlesome noise? It’s a mysterious and invisible source like digital “dark matter.” Physicists and astronomers believe most of the universe is filled with dark matter, a material that exerts gravitational effects but that no one has yet seen. Similarly, Koo and his team discovered the data that AI is being trained on lacks critical information, leading to significant blind spots. Even worse, those blind spots get factored in when interpreting AI predictions of DNA function. The study is published in the journal Genome Biology.
Artificial intelligence has proven itself useful in reading medical imaging and even shown it can pass doctors’ licensing exams.
Now, a new AI tool has demonstrated the ability to read physicians’ notes and accurately anticipate patients’ risk of death, readmission to hospital, and other outcomes important to their care.
Designed by a team at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the software is currently in use at the university’s affiliated hospitals throughout New York, with the hope that it will become a standard part of health care.
Researchers say they have been able to tap a new pool of organ donors to preserve and transplant their hearts: people whose hearts have stopped beating, resulting in so-called circulatory death.
Traditionally, the only people considered to be suitable organ donors were those who have been declared brain-dead but whose hearts and other organs have continued to function.
There’s another group that would be willing to donate if survival wasn’t possible: people who may have severe brain injuries but who are not brain-dead. In these cases, people are considered deceased when their hearts stop beating after withdrawal of life support, also called circulatory death.
Posted in biotech/medical, health
To learn more about nose and sinus cancers, we spoke with head and neck surgeon Ehab Hanna, M.D.
What are the symptoms of nose and sinus cancers?
Early symptoms often mimic those of more common conditions, such as sinus infections and allergies. As a result, these cancers are often misdiagnosed.
