Healthcare: reloaded...

Prefilled syringes are regarded as one of the safest options amongst the available alternatives for the intravenous mode of administration, as they demonstrate increased ease of self-administration due to elimination of dosing errors, as well as minimize the time requirements. Further, these syringes serve as a primary drug container for various drug delivery systems, such as autoinjectors and pen-injectors. Presently, more than 110 drugs, in combination with prefilled syringes, are commercially available. Amongst these, close to 60% of the products target autoimmune disorders. However, the increase in demand for such self-administration solutions has led to more stringent safety regulations, resulting in an evident rise in the cost of safety systems / end products.

A new PET imaging agent, 18F-AlF-FAPI-74, has been found to effectively monitor and predict treatment response of an up-and-coming cancer therapy. This non-invasive imaging approach has the potential to help inform important clinical decision-making early in the course of treatment—including re-dosing of therapy, dose optimization, change of therapeutic course, and many more—to optimize patient outcomes.

Les douze personnes atteintes d'un cancer du rectum sont entrées en phase de rémission après avoir pris du dostarlimab durant une période de six mois.

Kelonia Therapeutics is developing cell therapies made by the in vivo engineering of a patient’s cells made possible by the targeted delivery of a genetic payload. The startup, newly out of stealth with $50M in funding, claims its approach would offer manufacturing and safety advantages over other cell therapy technologies.

For digital health entrepreneurs, unless your intended use puts you in the FDA category of a medical device, you don’t need to show that your product is safe and effective, let alone cost-effective. In most cases, rather, you need to demonstrate to investors that it can quickly scale and make money and the sooner the better. Too bad. You would think that whether you have to or not that prudent sick care business practices would mean creating a product that does what you say it will do. That’s why only a handful of the hundreds of thousands of digital health apps are clinically valid.

Le laboratoire américain Pfizer est revenu sur le devant de la scène, hissé par le succès de son vaccin contre le Covid-19. Une réussite qui ne doit rien au hasard.

The startup helps people suffering from chronic illnesses by selling its remote-monitoring and gamified healthcare platform to major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Bayer and private insurers in the US and Europe. Sidekick is developing 18 digital treatments, covering conditions as diverse as diabetes and ulcerative colitis, and has 14 of those out in commercial partnerships. Eventually, Thorgeirsson tells Sifted, the plan is to build out more than 40 digital therapies. The idea is to provide ultra-personalised app-based treatment that can manage illness and catch serious conditions before they become life threatening, he adds.

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR T, has made a big impact on the treatment of certain blood cancers, allowing patients with relapsed/refractory disease to live longer, healthier lives. But in clinical study, the cellular therapy has not been as successful for patients with solid tumors, due in part to the lack of tumor targets not expressed in vital tissues. In a new study published in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, Moffitt Cancer Center researchers share the identification of a new potential target for CAR T cells called OR2H1 that they have demonstrated inhibits growth in lung and ovarian tumors.

The success of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy in solid tumors, unlike in hematologic malignancies, is limited by inadequate tumor infiltration and T cell dysfunction and exhaustion. Regional delivery of CAR T cells in patients with solid tumors is safe and feasible; promotes infiltration, proliferation, and trafficking; and ignites functionally persisting systemic immunity.

The reality is that walking 10,000 steps a day is a laudable goal and is almost certainly beneficial. But even lower levels of physical activity have benefits. The trick is not so much to aim for some theoretical ideal but to improve upon your current baseline. Encouraging patients to get into the habit of taking a daily walk (be it in the morning, during lunchtime, or in the evening) is going to pay dividends regardless of their daily step count. The point is that when it comes to physical activity, the greatest benefit seems to be when we go from doing nothing to doing something.

C’est l’université allemande de Heidelberg qui a mené cette étude pour le moins originale. Les chirurgiens étaient soumis à différents niveaux sonores avec soit la musique des Beatles soit au hard rock d'AC/DC, tandis que leurs gestes étaient analysés de près, sur base de la vitesse et la précision de leurs coupes chirurgicales.

Versant Ventures has launched Cimeio Therapeutics, a biotech startup with technology that can shield transplanted stem cells or cell therapies. Shielding these cells enables them to be dosed alongside an immunotherapy—an approach that is not currently done because the therapies don’t discriminate between diseased cells and transplanted ones.

Des échantillons d'eau de mer collectés dans le monde entier ont permis d'identifier plus de 5 000 nouvelles espèces de virus à ARN. Ces travaux élargissent les possibilités de recherche écologique et remodèlent notre compréhension

The short answer is, it doesn’t: Molecules can’t transport themselves through the body, and they don’t have control over where they eventually end up.

Dans le cadre d'un nouvel essai, la totalité des patients atteints d'un cancer rectal traités par une nouvelle approche d'immunothérapie ont vu leurs tumeurs disparaître après 6 mois de traitement.

Medical costs should become more transparent due to new federal regulations and laws that provide hospital patients with price protections, and require facilities and private health insurance plans to disclose fees. (Since, after meeting their annual deductible, Medicare beneficiaries don’t pay additional medical costs, many of these new rules and protections don’t directly affect them.)

Any type of cancer can be tricky to detect and treat. But blood malignancies are among the most devious—especially diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCL), the most common non-Hodgkin lymphomas among adults—and they can be the most serious. Complicating an accurate diagnosis and treatment, DLBCL has numerous subtypes. Some of the most malignant forms are even known to mimic normal cells and “hide” from treatments

Earlier this year, Moderna launched the first human trial of its HIV vaccine in the U.S in which it used eOD-GT8 60mer, a part of the HIV RNA sequence, as a recombinant protein. Designed by researchers at Scripps Research Institute, the immunogen elicits a specific type of B cell which then leads to the development of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) which are considered an important goal of an effective HIV vaccine. In the U.S. trial, the vaccine was determined to be safe and evoked an immune response in 97 percent of the trial participants (healthy adults), the press release said.

Infection by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) provides immunity against seasonal human coronaviruses (HCoVs). Whether SARS-CoV-2 infection causes a boost in the preexisting HCoV-specific antibodies or elicits cross-reactive β-CoV antibodies that target conserved epitopes is unknown.

In a recent study posted to the medRxiv* preprint server, researchers assessed the induction of variant-specific neutralizing antibodies against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike (S) and nucleocapsid (N) proteins of several SARS-CoV-2 strains.

A group of researchers led by St. Michael's Hospital of Unity Health Toronto recruited a total of 786 patients across nine primary care sites in Ontario who reported cost-related non-adherence to medications. Most of the study participants were recruited from St. Michael's Department of Family and Community Medicine and others were recruited from three rural sites. Participants were randomized into two groups - half received free medications via mail, the other half had their usual access to medications.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy is a revolutionary new pillar in cancer treatment. Although treatment with CAR-T cells has produced remarkable clinical responses with certain subsets of B cell leukemia or lymphoma, many challenges limit the therapeutic efficacy of CAR-T cells in solid tumors and hematological malignancies. Barriers to effective CAR-T cell therapy include severe life-threatening toxicities, modest anti-tumor activity, antigen escape, restricted trafficking, and limited tumor infiltration. In addition, the host and tumor microenvironment interactions with CAR-T cells critically alter CAR-T cell function. Furthermore, a complex workforce is required to develop and implement these treatments. In order to overcome these significant challenges, innovative strategies and approaches to engineer more powerful CAR-T cells with improved anti-tumor activity and decreased toxicity are necessary.

A new technique uses ultrasound waves to mechanically eliminate up to 75 percent of cancer cells, freeing the immune system to fight off the rest, and more.

VR-based interventions were found to improve psychological and physical symptoms in the breast cancer setting; however, there was little evidence to support VR-based interventions for improving fatigue. Additional large-scale pilot studies are needed to validate these findings.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine have devised an immunotherapy technique that combines chimeric antigen receptor-T cell therapy, or CAR-T cell therapy, with a cancer-killing virus to more effectively target and treat solid cancer tumors.  The combination approach, published in Science Translational Medicine, involves loading CAR-T cells, which are engineered […]