Clinic Hours

Correcting endothelial dysfunction in both human tissue and an elastase-induced murine model of emphysema shows promise in stopping and reversing the course of the disease, according to an international group of researchers.

EC loss and dysfunction were also hallmarks of emphysematous lungs harvested from the elastase-treated mice. The team found that intravenous delivery of healthy lung ECs from genetically identical mice reversed these phenotypes.

“We also found,” continued Dr. Racanelli, “that removing a specific molecule from the cells had a similar result.” In particular the researchers observe that “Leucine-rich a-2-glycoprotein- 1 (LRG1) was a driver of emphysema, and deletion of Lrg1 from endothelial cells rescued vascular rarefaction and alveolar regression.” LRG1 upregulation, they note ,”directly correlated with severity of the COPD phenotype.”

Source: Journal of Experimental Medicine

A case report describes a novel helmet device that generates a noninvasive oscillating magnetic field and that shrunk a glioblastoma tumor by about a third.

The patient had end-stage recurrent glioblastoma and had undergone all standard therapy options. He wore the device for 5 weeks but died from an unrelated injury, so the treatment period was cut short.

A brain scan showed a 31% reduction of contrast-enhanced tumor volume, and an autopsy of his brain confirmed the rapid response to the treatment.

Source: Frontiers in Oncology

In patients with advanced liver cancer who were unresponsive to lenvatinib, adding gefitinib (an EGFR inhibitor) led to a clinically meaningful response in a proof-of-concept study. 12 patients with advanced liver cancer who were unresponsive to lenvatinib treatment showed meaningful clinical responses after treatment with lenvatinib plus geftinib. Specifically, after 4-8 weeks of combination treatment, four patients had a partial response, four had stable disease and four showed disease progression.

Source: Reuters Health

Upregulation of urinary thromboxane B2 may be a new marker of aggressive prostate cancer in African American men, a group that bears a disproportionately high burden of lethal prostate cancer.

Thromboxane A2 (TXA2) is a platelet- and cyclooxygenase-derived eicosanoid that has been linked to metastasis. Dr. Stefan Ambs and colleagues with the National Cancer Institute investigated the role of TXA2 in the development of lethal prostate cancer in African American (AA) and European American (EA) men.

Using mass-spectrometry, they measured urinary 11-dehydrothromboxane B2 (TXB2), a stable metabolite of TXA2, in 977 men with prostate cancer (490 AA and 487 EA) and 1,022 controls (479 AA and 543 EA). During a median follow-up of 8.4 years, 246 men with prostate cancer died.

Source: Reuters Health

The combination of ficlatuzumab plus chemotherapy showed considerable early promise in relapsed/refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in a small phase-1 study.

Ficlatuzumab is an investigational, first-in-class monoclonal antibody that binds to extracellular hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) to prevent it from activating MET signaling and stimulating tumor growth.

Febrile neutropenia was the most common adverse event with the ficlatuzumab/cytarabine combination. Serious adverse events occurred in two patients, and there was one death deemed unrelated to the investigational therapy.

Source: Reuters Health

A Beijing-based veterinarian who was confirmed as China’s first human infection case with Monkey B virus (BV) has died. The 53-year-old male vet, who worked for an institution researching on non-human primates, showed early-onset symptoms of nausea and vomiting, a month after he dissected two dead monkeys. The virus, initially isolated in 1932, is an alphaherpesvirus enzootic in macaques of the genus Macaca.

B virus (Cercopithecine herpesvirus 1; BV) is a macaque α-herpesvirus that is similar to the herpes simplex viruses (HSV1 and HSV2) of humans. From an animal health standpoint, BV is not a serious problem in its natural macaque host. However, the fatal effect of zoonotic BV infection in humans has driven the effort to eliminate BV from research macaques. Historically, the case fatality rate in untreated human BV infection has been greater than 70%, a rate similar to untreated HSV encephalitis in humans.

The overactive bladder treatment mirabegron (Myrbetriq) is one of three new drugs to be linked to cases of drug-associated antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody-associated vasculitis (DA-AAV) according to pharmacovigilance data.

The other two drugs are the antiviral agent sofosbuvir (Sovaldi) and the tyrosine kinase inhibitor nintedanib (Ofev), which is indicated for chronic fibrosing interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) with a progressive phenotype.

Source: Medscape