Early research: Lighting up cancer tumors and priming natural killer cells

In-person biomedical conferences are back, including the American Association for Cancer Research’s ongoing meeting in New Orleans. The latest:

While CAR T-therapy has cured some people with blood cancers, this form of immunotherapy has so far produced lackluster results for solid tumors like lung or kidney cancer. But a new early-phase clinical trial presented yesterday suggests that CAR T-cells may be able to shrink some solid tumors — as long as it gets a boost from an mRNA vaccine from BioNTech. Read more from STAT's Angus Chen.
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center scientists have developed a nanomaterial that can carry a therapeutic payload and deliver it only at the precise acidity of a cancer tumor. Potential uses for these micelles: highlighting tumors with a fluorescent dye to help surgeons excise cancer in the operating room and releasing immunotherapy drugs directly into tumors. Angus has more.
An experimental immunotherapy involving natural killer cells — the body’s first line of defense against foreign invaders — elicited complete remissions in a majority of patients with advanced Hodgkin lymphoma, researchers reported yesterday. In the study, eight of the 13 patients given an optimized dose and schedule of the therapy saw their tumor cells completely disappear with minimal side effects. STAT’s Adam Feuerstein has more.

Current reality: Older Black patients with cancer more likely to be frail and do worse

Advances in cancer biology often stand in contrast to how patients fare in real life. A new study in the journal Cancer exploring why racial disparities in cancer outcomes persist suggests that more frailty and other physical limitations could account in part for poorer survival among Black people. Among 553 gastrointestinal cancer patients over age 60 who were listed in a registry at University of Alabama at Birmingham, half of Black people but one-third of white people were assessed as frail, meaning they had trouble walking one block and carrying out typical activities of daily living because of weakness and fatigue. These differences remained after accounting for age, sex, education, cancer type, cancer stage, and underlying conditions. Frailty affects how people respond to chemotherapy, how often they need hospital care, and how long they survive, the researchers note, urging more work to understand why, and how to overcome this gap.

Opinion: How Apollo 13 and Covid-19 vaccination are both ‘successful failures’

Doomed from the start: That phrase neatly describes the Apollo 13 mission, which launched this day in 1970, and the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination effort in the U.S., Christopher Worsham and Anupam B. Jena of Harvard Medical School write in a STAT First Opinion. Yet they argue both can be seen as “successful failures.” An explosion endangered the astronauts 200,000 miles away from Earth, but they and NASA engineered a miracle, pulling success from failure. So while the U.S. has failed its primary mission of saving lives as Covid-19 deaths approach 1 million, it has still managed to administer at least one vaccine dose to 88% of adults. “This should be viewed as an important public health accomplishment — a success within the country’s broader failure,” the authors assert.

Closer look: Small hospitals are ‘in the crosshairs’ of ransomware attacks

(mike reddy for stat)

At 12:08 p.m. on a Monday, a Sky Lakes Medical Center employee tapped an email link. Within minutes, that click had cracked open the Oregon hospital’s digital infrastructure for cybercriminals to infiltrate. In a note discovered on a server, the attackers announced that the 100-bed Klamath Falls hospital, which serves a 10,000-square-mile area in rural southern Oregon, had been hit with ransomware. For the next 23 days, as the hospital was facing its first Covid surge, clinicians and nurses used pen and paper for note-taking, struggling to care for patients without access to their medical histories, lab results or imaging scans, or emergency contacts. Being locked up by ransomware is no longer a concern reserved solely for major health systems. But for smaller hospitals and practices, the costs — both to patients and to the bottom line — can be especially steep. STAT contributor Marion Renault has more.

Fewer than half of clinical trials report race or ethnicity data

In what its authors call the largest analysis of enrollment in U.S. clinical trials, a new study analyzing 20 years of data from more than 20,000 trials finds that fewer than 44% reported the race or ethnicity of their participants. When those data did exist, they showed that people from minority groups were underrepresented relative to the overall population. In their paper, published in Lancet Regional Health —The Americas, the researchers noted that about 10% of trials included only white people. The largest disparities showed up in Hispanic/Latino and Asian participants. And while Black enrollment did not fall below U.S. population representation, about 21% of trials reported no Black participants. In another difference, trials funded by industry had larger gaps than government-funded research in enrolling minority participants.

Testing sexually active teens for STIs falls short

There’s a major mismatch between who is diagnosed with sexually transmitted infections and who gets tested for them. A study out today in the journal Pediatrics notes that while young people between the ages of 15 and 24 account for half of new STIs, and one-quarter of sexually active female adolescents have an STI, only one-fifth of sexually active high school students surveyed in 2019 said they’d been tested for an STI such as chlamydia or gonorrhea in the last year. Females were twice as likely as males to say they had been tested. The low total numbers suggest health care providers are not following national guidelines to broach the idea of testing with young people, especially among sexually active females and males who have sex with males, who should be tested for chlamydia and gonorrhea annually, the authors say. A companion editorial recommends opt-out testing to improve rates.

What to read around the web today

How the FDA’s food division fails to regulate health and safety hazards. Politico
Facing invasive treatments for uterine fibroids, Black women advocate for better care. NPR
The Pharmalot View: ‘Precedents are important’: Aduhelm coverage restrictions could shape the future of accelerated approval. STAT
Arthur D. Riggs, 82, dies; led team that invented artificial insulin. New York Times
Opinion: The 'bot holiday' and why clinicians can't tackle disinformation alone. STAT