Tag: 6/11/20

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Earlier Immunotherapy and Chemo May Help Stomach Cancer Treatment

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New research indicates that earlier immunotherapy in combination with normal chemotherapy may be needed to treat stomach cancer, which is often resistant to the treatment.

“Patients with advanced stomach cancer have limited treatment options,” says Woosook Kim, PhD, first author of the paper. “Many are not eligible for surgical resection, and response to radiotherapy or chemotherapy is often low.”

Many cancers release proteins that prevent the immune system from attacking them; immunotherapy blocks these proteins, re-enabling the immune system’s attack. However, current immunotherapy drugs do not work very well for stomach cancer. Looking at advanced tumours in mice, researchers discovered that they have abundant myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), which release even more immune system-blocking proteins, swamping the immunotherapy drugs.

“Our study suggests that adding chemotherapy to immunotherapy may improve responsiveness in part through the targeting of MDSCs,” said Timothy Wang, MD, the study leader. “While we do not have enough information to determine if the level of MDSCs may predict response to this dual regimen, our findings show that administering immunotherapy in combination with chemotherapy earlier in the course of the disease, when MDSC levels are much lower, may boost response rates in stomach cancer,” Wang concluded.

Source: Medical Xpress

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Impact of COVID Lockdown on Soweto Residents’ Mental Health

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A new study reported by Health-e has revealed the mental health toll that COVID and the lockdown to control it took on residents of Soweto, with 957 participants interviewed before the lockdown and then six weeks into the lockdown.

The interviews revealed that some 14% of those surveyed were at risk of depression, which was worsened by factors such as childhood trauma as well as their level of knowledge about COVID. Feeling unable to take precautions against the virus caused anxiety levels to skyrocket. 

“While participants believed that the pandemic did not affect their mental health or their ‘mind,’ the strong relationship between perceived risk and depressive symptoms raises the concern that they may not be aware of the potential threats to their mental health during Covid-19,” said Dr Andrew Wooyoung Kim, co-director of the study. “This discrepancy may be due to different ideas of mental health, including mental health stigma.”

Kim acknowledges that the challenging South African environment of poverty and poor services may also have had significant impacts.
“Our study re-emphasises the importance of prioritising and provisioning accessible mental health resources for resource-limited communities in Soweto and across South Africa,” Kim added. 

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Anti-anxiety Drug Repurposed to Boost Cancer Therapies

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University of Cincinnati clinician-scientist Soma Sengupta, MD, PhD, says that new findings from a study conducted by her and Daniel Pomeranz Krummel, PhD, showed promising results towards enhancing the effectiveness of traditional cancer treatments with a simple anti-anxiety drug, repurposed and proven effective against melanomas.

Sengupta said, “While physicians can often quickly find and treat melanoma of the skin, metastatic melanoma, or melanoma that has spread to other parts of the body, often the brain, is a lethal cancer. Often, patients who receive immunotherapy, which uses the patient’s own immune system to treat the condition, do not have good responses. They also experience many uncomfortable side effects that impact their quality of life.”

By using a new class of sedatives (related to diazepam) to target GABA receptors, radiation or immune therapy could be enhanced, with reduced side effects. Animal study results showed that the drug allowed better infiltration of immune cells into the tumour cells, causing them to shrink, or in some cases even disappear.

“Our long-term goal is to add this new class of drugs to a patient’s radiation and immunotherapy treatment,” said Sengupta. “We hope this will help patients avoid side effects, and that by adding this drug to the regimens, we will reduce costs, since we think the treatments will become more effective, and in turn, doses of standard treatments can be lowered. More studies are needed, but this is a promising new approach using a non-toxic drug from a class of compounds that have already been approved for anxiety, but now used for a serious condition that claims lives every day.”

Source: News-Medical.Net

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UNICEF Calls for Urgent Action to Avoid Polio and Measles Epidemics

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UNICEF and the World Health Organization issued a press release today calling for a major effort to avert impending epidemics of both polio and measles resulting from disruption caused by COVID.

The organisations estimate that US$655 million (US$400 million for polio and US$255 million for measles) is needed to address immunity gaps that are opening up for these deadly and debilitating diseases.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said, “COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on health services and in particular immunization services, worldwide. But unlike with COVID, we have the tools and knowledge to stop diseases such as polio and measles. What we need are the resources and commitments to put these tools and knowledge into action. If we do that, children’s lives will be saved.”

Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director, added, “We cannot allow the fight against one deadly disease to cause us to lose ground in the fight against other diseases. Addressing the global COVID-19 pandemic is critical. However, other deadly diseases also threaten the lives of millions of children in some of the poorest areas of the world. That is why today we are urgently calling for global action from country leaders, donors and partners. We need additional financial resources to safely resume vaccination campaigns and prioritize immunization systems that are critical to protect children and avert other epidemics besides COVID-19.”

Gaps were already opening in measles coverage, with minor outbreaks even before the disruption of the COVID pandemic. Polio risks resurgence in Afghanistan, Pakistan and in under-immunised areas of Africa. To help address these challenges, a novel polio vaccine is being developed and a new response plan is being developed.

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Study Reconstructs Original SARS-CoV-2 “Progenitor” Genome

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Medical Xpress reports on a study which managed to make a reconstruction of the original SARS-CoV-2 genome that infected patient zero.

No genome could have possibly been sampled in the early days when the virus made the jump to humans while the world was still unaware of the disease; thus, it has to be reconstructed by working backwards through all the mutations recorded. This study was led by Sudhir Kumar, director of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine, Temple University, and sifted through 30 000 complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes, searching for what they called the “progenitor genome”.

Previous attempts to reach the same goal because the focus was to build an evolutionary tree, said Kumar. “This coronavirus evolves too slow, the number of genomes to analyze is too large, and the data quality of genomes is highly variable. I immediately saw parallels between the properties of these genetic data from coronavirus with the genetic data from the clonal spread of another nefarious disease, cancer,” Kumar said.

The research has already yielded intriguing insights; a protein that made the virus more infectious apparently appeared early on, before many of the other mutations that took place, but this protein was not in the progenitor genome.