Tag: Cancer

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Sickle Cell Therapy Not Linked to Most cancers, Researchers Say

Sickle Cell Treatment Not Linked to Cancer, Researchers Say

Just weeks after promising sickle cell disease gene therapy appeared to hit a roadblock, the outlook for treatment is now looking brighter. Preliminary data suggesting it could cause cancer has not held up.

In gene therapy, scientists insert a normal gene into the patient’s DNA to correct sickle cell disease caused by a devastating mutation. The cutting-edge treatment could prove to be a cure, and a company testing the treatment, Bluebird Bio, was on track to apply for approval from the Food and Drug Administration next year.

However, on February 16, Bluebird Bio announced that a sickle cell patient treated in a clinical trial five years ago had developed acute myeloid leukemia. Another patient developed acute myelodysplastic syndrome, a form of cancer that is often a precursor to leukemia.

The company stopped its studies of sickle cell patients and those with another blood disorder called beta thalassemia while its researchers tried to understand whether gene therapy was flawed.

On Wednesday, Bluebird Bio reported that it had found no evidence that gene therapy caused the sickle cell patient’s leukemia.

The gene inserted into the patient’s DNA did not interfere with the function of other genes, the company said. And the gene wasn’t inserted into the genome near anyone else known to be involved in leukemia.

Bluebird Bio is still investigating whether its treatment is related to acute myelodysplastic syndrome, but officials have asked the Food and Drug Administration to allow their clinical trials to continue.

A separate sickle cell study at Boston Children’s Hospital was also discontinued when Bluebird Bio announced the two cancers at the request of the National Institutes of Health, which is paying for the study.

Dr. David Williams, a hematologist at Boston Children’s and lead researcher on the study, said the researchers are asking permission from the NIH to resume their work.

Like Bluebird Bio investigators, Dr. Williams and his colleagues used a disabled lentivirus to deliver a gene to sickle cell patients. Lentiviruses are considered safe – hundreds of patients in other gene therapy studies have been treated with them and no blood cancers have been reported. The possibility that lentiviruses may not be safe was a matter of great concern.

The leukemia patient in the Bluebird Bio study had genetic abnormalities related to leukemia, which could explain why they developed.

Philip Gregory, the company’s chief scientist, said it was not yet clear whether the patient diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome actually had it. So far, Bluebird Bio has not been able to find any cancer cells in its bone marrow.

“He may have been diagnosed prematurely,” said Dr. Gregory. If cancer cells are found in the patient’s marrow, the company will perform the same detailed molecular analysis it did for the leukemia patient, added Dr. Gregory added.

Dr. John Tisdale, director of cellular and molecular therapeutics at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, was cautiously optimistic.

“These data actually dismiss the vector as causal,” he wrote in an email. He added that the researchers need a better understanding of the study participants’ illnesses before they can exhale one last sigh of relief.

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Lung Most cancers Scans Are Really useful for Folks 50 and Older With Shorter Smoking Histories

Lung Cancer Scans Are Recommended for People 50 and Older With Shorter Smoking Histories

“There is evidence that a fairly simple, five-minute, low-dose, low-radiation scan can really save many lives,” said Dr. Bernard J. Park, pulmonary surgeon and clinical director of the lungs. Screening service at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Around 75 to 85 percent of the cancers found in this screening are in stage 1 and it is estimated that only surgery or radiation can be cured.

Dr. Park said that many people who signed up for screening had quit smoking or were trying to quit, but that some viewed clear scans as a sign that they could continue smoking.

Dr. Smith said the American Cancer Society should revise its own guidelines for lung cancer screening and that its advice would likely be similar to that of the task force.

In 2013, the American Academy of Family Physicians declined to recommend for or against CT screening for lung cancer because of insufficient evidence. But the President, Dr. Ada Stewart, in a statement emailed Monday, said the academy would review the task force’s new evidence and decide whether to update its own recommendation to its members.

There were 2.09 million new cases of lung cancer worldwide in 2018, and the disease is also the leading cause of cancer deaths according to the World Health Organization. That year 1.76 million people died.

According to the National Cancer Institute, there were 228,820 new cases of lung cancer in the U.S. in 2020, killing 135,720 people. About 90 percent of cases occur in people who smoke, and the current risk for smokers of developing the disease is about 20 times that of non-smokers.

Only about 20.5 percent of patients survive five years after diagnosis. Most cases are diagnosed late after the cancer has spread. But if it can be found and treated early, a cure is possible, doctors say.

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Altria asks FDA to unfold the phrase that nicotine does not trigger most cancers

Altria asks FDA to spread the word that nicotine doesn't cause cancer

A Marlboro cigarette.

Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Marlboro’s parent, Altria, has asked the Food and Drug Administration to help spread the word that nicotine doesn’t cause cancer.

CNBC received a copy of a letter Altria sent to the FDA on Thursday asking the agency to spread the word about nicotine as part of a proposed publicity campaign about the risks of tobacco use.

“We received the letter and we will respond directly to the company,” FDA spokeswoman Alison Hunt told CNBC in an email.

Altria was not immediately available to comment on the matter.

In the February 25 letter signed by Paige C. Magness, senior vice president of Regulatory Affairs, Altria cited government studies on misperceptions about nicotine. It was said that eliminating such misperceptions would help traditional smokers switch to non-flammable methods of using nicotine, which may be less risky than products containing smoke.

Bloomberg News first reported the letter Thursday.

While the vast majority of Altria’s revenue comes from the sale of cigarettes and cigars, the company is also involved in vaping firm Juul and the nicotine pouch brand On! Involves and markets IQOS, a smokeless tobacco product that heats tobacco instead of burning it in the United States

There are at least 60 carcinogens in cigarette smoke, but these newer products deliver nicotine without the smoke.

As the regulator of Altria, the FDA can determine what claims it can make of its products. The FDA has allowed Altria to market IQOS in a way that would reduce the exposure of users to harmful chemicals than cigarette smoke.

Nicotine is the addicting ingredient to tobacco and it can have other negative health effects. In its report, Bloomberg said studies have shown that nicotine can affect brain development and birth outcomes, and in large doses acts as an agricultural poison.

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A Covid Vaccine Facet Impact, Enlarged Lymph Nodes, Can Be Mistaken for Most cancers

A Covid Vaccine Side Effect, Enlarged Lymph Nodes, Can Be Mistaken for Cancer

Coronavirus vaccinations can cause enlarged lymph nodes in the armpit or near the collarbone, which may be mistaken for a sign of cancer.

As vaccines roll out across the country, doctors are seeing more and more of these swollen lumps in recently vaccinated people, and medical journals have started publishing reports aimed at reducing anxiety and helping patients avoid unnecessary testing for a harmless condition that will go away a couple of weeks.

The swelling is a normal immune system response to the vaccine and occurs on the same side as the arm the shot was fired on. It can also occur after other vaccinations, including those for the flu and human papillomavirus (HPV). Patients may or may not notice it. However, the enlarged lymph nodes appear as white spots on mammograms and breast scans and are similar to pictures that may indicate the spread of cancer through a tumor in the breast or elsewhere in the body.

“I make special efforts to inform all patients who are being monitored after successful previous cancer treatment,” said Dr. Constance D. Lehman, author of two magazine articles on the problem and director of breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I can’t imagine the fear of getting the scan and hearing. ‘We found a lump that is big. We don’t believe it is cancer, but we can’t tell, or worse, we believe it could be cancer. “

The armpit swelling was a recognized side effect in the large studies of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. In Moderna’s study, 11.6 percent of patients reported swollen lymph nodes after the first dose and 16 percent after the second dose. Pfizer-BioNTech appeared to have a lower incidence, with 0.3 percent of patients reporting it. However, these numbers only reflect what patients and their doctors have noticed, and radiologists say the real rate is likely higher and that imaging such as mammograms, MRIs, or CT scans are likely to have many more cases.

The condition was not listed among the reported side effects in a Food and Drug Administration information document about the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine. On Saturday, the agency approved the company’s emergency vaccine.

Dr. Lehman said it was important for imaging centers to ask patients if they received Covid vaccinations and to record the date of the shot and the arm it was placed in.

Your clinic includes this notice in a letter to patients whose screening reveals swelling but no other abnormalities: “The lymph nodes in your armpit area that we see on your mammogram are on the page where you got your last Covid-19 vaccine got bigger. Enlarged lymph nodes are common after the Covid-19 vaccine and are your body’s normal response to the vaccine. However, if you feel a lump in your armpit that lasts more than six weeks after your vaccination, you should tell your doctor. “

One way to avoid the problem is to postpone routine mammograms and other imaging tests for at least six weeks after the last dose of vaccine. This comes from a panel of experts article in Radiology magazine published on Wednesday.

Updated

March 1, 2021, 3:41 p.m. ET

A professional group, the Society of Breast Imaging, offers similar advice: “If possible and if care is not unduly delayed, you should schedule screening exams before the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine or 4-6 weeks after the second dose.” a Covid-19 vaccination. “

However, the panel of experts also warned that non-routine imaging, which is needed to treat a disease or other symptoms that could suggest cancer, should not be delayed. Immunization should also not take place.

People with cancer are generally recommended to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, especially because they are at a higher risk of dying from Covid than the general population. However, some cancer treatments can affect the body’s ability to fully respond to the vaccine, and the American Cancer Society advises patients to consult with their oncologists about vaccinations.

Recently vaccinated people who have cancer and develop enlarged lymph nodes may need additional tests, including a biopsy of the nodes, said Dr. Lehman.

She described a patient with a newly diagnosed breast tumor who had swollen lymph nodes on the same side and who had recently received a Covid shot in the arm on that side.

A biopsy was performed, an important step to determine if there were any malignant cells in the nodes, which would then help determine a course of treatment. It was negative for cancer. The vaccine most likely caused the swelling.

In another case, a woman who previously had cancer of the right breast had a routine mammogram that showed an enlarged lymph node in her left armpit and no other abnormality. She recently had a Covid vaccination on her left arm. Doctors found that no further testing would be needed if the swollen lumps did not last more than six weeks.

A man with a history of bone cancer did a chest CT scan as part of a follow-up exam found swollen lymph nodes in one armpit – on the side where he had recently received a Covid shot. Nothing else was wrong and no further testing was required. The same decision was made for similar findings in a recently vaccinated man who had a chest CT scan to screen for lung cancer and in a woman with a history of melanoma.

For patients undergoing cancer treatment in one breast, the Covid shot should be given in the arm on the other side, said Dr. Lehman. The vaccine can also be injected into the thigh to avoid problems with lymph node swelling.

“This could really affect a lot of people if we don’t get vaccination status straight away in imaging centers,” said Dr. Lehman. “I also want cancer patients to know that they can get the vaccine on the opposite side or even on the leg to avoid confusion.”

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Vaccine Hesitancy in Most cancers Sufferers

Vaccine Hesitancy in Cancer Patients

Ideally, cancer patients who want the shot could get it in their cancer centers rather than a mass distribution location. But a bumpy rollout and age restrictions have frustrated many people with cancer. If the shot is offered, Dr. Brawley still has his patients in active therapy and those in follow-up care. Certainly, they may not react as strongly as someone with an intact immune system. They do receive some protection, however, and are not harmed, as Moderna and Pfizer’s current vaccines are not made from live viruses (like measles, rubella, mumps, and smallpox were). Live virus vaccines must be avoided by severely immunocompromised individuals.

Updated

Apr. 25, 2021, 9:04 p.m. ET

Moderna and Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccines, explains Dr. Brawley, are made from messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) using a new technology. Its genetic material causes the vaccinated person to produce the same proteins that are found in the spikes of the novel coronavirus.

“The vaccinated person’s immune system then recognizes these proteins as foreign and produces antibodies against them,” said Dr. Brawley. “Another immune cell, a dendritic cell, also records the proteins as foreign.”

Dr. William Nelson, director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, agreed that “the worst that can happen to cancer patients vaccinated with the coronavirus vaccine” is “a bad reaction.” The worst reactions are likely to occur in people dealing with B-cell lymphoma and multiple myeloma, he explained, since these therapies often use drugs that target antibody-producing cells in the body. “For people undergoing a bone marrow transplant,” advised Dr. Nelson, vaccinations should likely be scheduled three to six months after the transplant to ensure immune regeneration has occurred.

As important as the vaccines are, Dr. Nelson urged people with cancer as well as their families and friends to “remain vigilant when it comes to wearing masks, social distancing, hand washing, etc.” Because cancer patients often have low white blood cell counts, their symptoms – fever, muscle pain, headache, dry cough – cannot be distinguished from those of Covid-19. “Now these patients must also be quickly tested for the coronavirus and isolated in a suitable facility so that their intravenous antibiotics can be infused.”

When the health authorities in my state of Indiana announced that they would be vaccinating people over 70, I had no problem signing up for an appointment online. When I took my first shot in a small medical facility, it was full of people buoyed by high hopes for widespread, so-called herd immunity. My own optimism has been overshadowed by regular news this winter of maskless receptions, rallies, protests, parties, and raves, as well as personal conversations with people who fear vaccinations in general.

As Eula Biss explained in her brilliant prepandemic book On Immunity, fear of the government, the medical establishment, and public interference with the private establishment can stifle the collective trust that attaining immunity requires. Because cancer patients are often affected by anxiety, they may be particularly prone to these types of anxieties.

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She Beat Most cancers at 10. Now She’ll Be a part of SpaceX’s First Personal Journey to Orbit.

She Beat Cancer at 10. Now She'll Join SpaceX's First Private Trip to Orbit.

Hayley Arceneaux, 29, had hoped this would be the year she would achieve her goal of visiting all seven continents before she turned 30.

However, she won’t have time for it.

She goes into space.

Ms. Arceneaux, a medical assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, will be one of four people on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Florida. It’s slated to launch later this year and be the first crewed mission to orbit Earth where no one on board is a professional astronaut.

“I asked, ‘Will I get a passport stamp to go into space?'” Ms. Arceneaux said. “But I don’t think I’ll do it. So I’ll just draw a star and the moon in one of my passports. “

This adventure is led by Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire who announced in January that he had bought the rocket launch from SpaceX, the space company founded by Elon Musk. Mr. Isaacman said at the time that he wanted the mission to be more than an outing for the super rich and that he had given St. Jude two of the four available spots.

One of them will go to a random winner of a sweepstakes competition to raise money for the hospital, which treats children for free and develops cures for childhood cancer and other diseases.

The other seat, Isaacman said, is occupied by a front line health worker in St. Jude, someone who symbolizes hope.

On Monday, St. Jude and Mr. Isaacman officials announced that Ms. Arceneaux was the person they had selected.

Ms. Arceneaux could be the youngest American to ever travel to orbit. She will also be the first person to go into space with a prosthetic body. She was a patient in St. Jude nearly 20 years ago, and metal bars replaced parts of the bones in her left leg as part of her treatment for bone cancer.

In the past, this would have kept her firmly on the ground and would not have been able to meet NASA’s strict medical standards for astronauts. But the advent of privately funded space travel has opened the final frontier to some people who were previously excluded.

Dr. Michael D. Neel, the orthopedic surgeon who installed Ms. Arceneaux’s prosthesis, says that while artificial leg bones mean she can’t practice contact sports on Earth, they shouldn’t limit her on this SpaceX trek.

“It shows us that the sky is not the limit,” said Dr. Neel. “It’s Heaven and Beyond. I think that’s the real point of it all, that it has very few restrictions on what you can do. Unless you’re playing soccer up there. “

Ms. Arceneaux said she hoped to inspire patients at St. Jude.

“You will be able to see a cancer survivor in space, especially one who went through the same thing as you,” she said. “It will help you visualize your future.”

Richard C. Shadyac Jr., president of ALSAC, the St. Jude fundraising organization, said of Ms. Arceneaux, “If anyone was a symbol of hope, it was Hayley.”

Mrs. Arceneaux herself did not find out until early January that she would take a seat on the rocket. Hospital officials had vaguely told her there was an opportunity they wanted to talk to her about. She said she thought “maybe it would be a commercial or maybe give a speech somewhere.”

Instead, it was an opportunity to become an astronaut.

“I even kind of laughed,” said Ms. Arceneaux. “I thought: what? Yes. Yes, please, that would be great. “She added,” Let me talk to my mom. “

Her mother had no objection.

Ms. Arceneaux first stepped on St. Jude in 2002. She was 10 years old. She had earned her black belt in taekwondo shortly before, but complained of pain in her leg. Her mother saw a lump sticking out over her left knee. The pediatrician in the small town of St. Francisville, La., Where they lived not far from Baton Rouge, told them it was a cancerous tumor.

“We have all fallen apart,” said Mrs. Arceneaux. “I remember being so scared because by the age of 10 everyone I knew with cancer had died.”

In St. Jude, doctors gave the good news that the cancer had not spread to other parts of the body. Ms. Arceneaux had chemotherapy, prosthetic leg surgery, and long sessions of physical therapy.

Already at this young age, bald from chemotherapy, Ms. Arceneaux was helping with fundraising for St. Jude. The next year she was recognized by Louisiana Public Broadcasting with one of its Young Heroes Awards.

“When I grow up, I want to be a nurse in St. Jude,” she said in a video shown at the 2003 ceremony. “I want to be a mentor to patients. When they walk in I’ll say, “I had this when I was little and I’m fine.”

Last year Ms. Arceneaux was hired by St. Jude. She works with children with leukemia and lymphoma, such as a teenager she recently spoke to.

“I informed him that I had also lost my hair,” said Ms. Arceneaux. I said to him, ‘You can ask me anything. I am a former patient. I will tell you the truth, everything you want to know. ‘And he said,’ Are you really going to tell me the truth? ‘ And I said yes. “

His burning question: “Are you the one who goes into space?”

Mrs. Arceneaux had to evade. “I said, ‘Well, we’ll see who gets announced.'” She said. “But I think he knew because then he and his father said,” Yes! “and fifty.”

Ms. Arceneaux and Mr. Isaacman visited SpaceX’s California headquarters three times to meet with engineers and plan the trip. Unlike the missions SpaceX flies for NASA, it won’t go to the International Space Station, but will orbit the earth for three or four days before splashing off the coast of Florida.

“She has an adventurous spirit,” said Isaacman of Ms. Arceneaux. “And now she’s allowed to travel to the stars, which is pretty cool.”

It will be a few more weeks before they know who their companions will be.

The St. Jude Sweepstakes, featured in a television commercial that aired during the Super Bowl two weeks ago, will run until the end of the month. Around $ 9.5 million has been raised to date. That appears to be way below the $ 100 million Isaacman himself pledged for St. Jude, or the overall goal of $ 200 million. But Mr. Isaacman and Mr. Shadyac said the fundraiser was going beyond the sweepstakes and that they were happy with the progress.

“This is going to be a campaign that will last until launch,” said Shadyac.

The competition is structured in such a way that the amount of donations is effectively limited. Entry is free. A minimum donation of $ 10 buys 100 entries, and each additional dollar donated buys 10 additional entries, up to $ 1,000 for 10,000 entries.

There were some more expensive options that are now sold out. For example, Mr. Isaacman will give a donor who has donated $ 100,000 a ride on the Russian-built MiG-29 jet fighter he owns. The donor will also be given a trip to watch the launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But that donor still only has 10,000 entries in the contest, just like someone who donated $ 1,000.

Mr. Isaacman said this was a deliberate choice to prevent a wealthy person from trying to win the grand prize of a trip to space by buying millions of items.

“Will it represent everyone on earth and not just rich whites?” Mr. Isaacman said.

The fourth SpaceX seat goes to the winner of a competition sponsored by Shift4, Isaacman’s company, that sells terminals and point of sale systems for credit card processing to restaurants and other businesses. The “Shark Tank” -like competition calls on entrepreneurs to design an online shop with the Shift4 software and then publish a video on Twitter describing their business.

As of last week, fewer than 100 people had submitted full entries. “It means that once you’ve created and entered a Shift4 store, your chances are pretty amazing,” said Isaacman.

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Biden says U.S. will search to ‘finish most cancers as we all know it’ after Covid pandemic

Biden says U.S. will seek to 'end cancer as we know it' after Covid pandemic

President Joe Biden said Friday that after fighting the coronavirus pandemic, his government will fight another deadly disease: cancer.

“I want you to know that once we defeat Covid, we will do everything we can to end cancer as we know it,” Biden said in a speech after opening the massive Pfon coronavirus vaccine manufacturing facility in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Almost 600,000 people will die of cancer in 2019. Nearly 1.9 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed in the US in 2021, American Cancer Society researchers estimate.

One of Biden’s sons, Beau Biden, died of an aggressive form of brain tumor at the age of 46.

Biden said two White House offices, the Science and Technology Advisory Council and the Science and Technology Policy Bureau, will be involved in developing an “advanced research effort into cancer and other diseases.”

Dr. Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, will jointly lead both offices, Biden said.

The president compared the initiative to DARPA, the Pentagon agency charged with testing new technologies.

As a presidential candidate, Biden suggested creating such an agency as part of his platform’s Made in America plank. Its campaign website called it the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H.

Then-candidate Biden reportedly raised the proposal frequently at fundraisers for private campaigns, though he rarely spoke about it at public events.

Biden’s forward-looking announcement seemed to send the message that his government has gotten a better grip on the pandemic.

That message was underscored by the location he intended to deliver it to: a 1,300 acre vaccine manufacturing facility where millions of doses of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine are manufactured, packaged, frozen and shipped.

“We’re now at a point where the average daily number of people vaccinated has nearly doubled since the week before I took office, to an average of 1.7 million per day,” said Biden, adding: ” We’re on track to exceed my commitment to “administer 100 million shots in his first 100 days as president”.

But “despite the progress, we are still in the teeth of a pandemic,” warned Biden.

He noted that new strains of the virus are emerging and that the U.S. is poised to soon pass the grim milestone of 500,000 deaths from Covid.

“If there is one message that needs to be given to everyone in this country, it is this: The vaccines are safe. Please take the vaccine for yourself, your family, your community, this country, when it is your turn and are available, “said Biden.

Biden urged Americans to continue taking precautions for their health and safety, including hand washing, social distancing and wearing masks.

“Look, I know it’s inconvenient, but you make a commitment when you do,” said Biden. “Everyone has to do their part for themselves, their loved ones and, yes, their country. It’s a patriotic duty.”

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Emil Freireich, Groundbreaking Most cancers Researcher, Dies at 93

Emil Freireich, Groundbreaking Cancer Researcher, Dies at 93

Dr. Emil Freireich, a relentless cancer doctor and researcher who helped develop treatments for childhood leukemia that dramatically changed the lives of patients believed to have little hope of survival, died on February 1 at University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center at Houston. where he had worked since 1965. He was 93 years old.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Debra Ann Freireich-Bier. The hospital said it tested positive for Covid-19 but it has not yet been identified as a cause of death.

Dr. A transformative, magnetic, and occasionally aggressive personality, Freireich spent his career at the National Cancer Institute and MD Anderson researching new cancer treatments and training hundreds of doctors to follow him.

“He oversaw research in all cancers, directed and dictated the development of protocols, implemented them and published results that were adopted worldwide,” said Dr. Hagop Kantarjian, MD Anderson Leukemia Chairperson.

When Dr. Freireich (pronounced FRY-Rike) 1955 his work at the NCI in Bethesda, Md., Admission, acute childhood leukemia was viewed as a death sentence. As he walked into the ward where the children were being treated, he remembered their bleeding because their blood had practically no platelets, the disc-shaped cells that clot blood.

It was like being in a slaughterhouse, his boss, Dr. C. Gordon Zubrod.

“They bleed from their ears, from their skin,” said Dr. Freireich wrote to the author Malcolm Gladwell in “David and Goliath: Outsiders, Outsiders, and the Art of Fighting Giants” (2013). “There was blood on everything. The nurses would come to work in their white uniforms in the morning and go home covered in blood. “

Dr. Freireich, a hematologist and oncologist, tested his hypothesis that the lack of platelets was causing the bleeding by mixing some of his own blood with something from the children.

“Would it be normal?” He said in an interview for an NCI oral history project in 1997. “Sure enough.”

Further tests conducted to convince his skeptics at the Cancer Institute have proven him right.

But he had another problem: the blood the children had been given lacked the platelets necessary for blood to clot because it was at least 48 hours old. The platelets had deteriorated and were unusable.

Dr. Freireich successfully advocated the use of freshly donated blood that could be transfused as quickly as possible and that was not in the institute’s blood bank. A minister who was the father of one of the patients once brought 20 of his congregation to donate blood.

Dr. Looking for a more effective way to deliver platelets to his patients, Freireich began developing a machine to extract platelets from white and red blood cells. He soon found an unexpected ally in George Judson, an IBM engineer whose son had leukemia and who had turned up at the institute to offer his expertise.

Soon they were working on a continuous flow blood separator that was found to be far more efficient at delivering platelets than blood transfusions. (The separator, which used a high-speed centrifuge, was patented in 1966.)

Dr. However, Freireich’s most important and enduring achievement was using a combination of drugs to put leukemia into remission. He explored options in chemotherapy with several NCI colleagues, including Dr. Emil Frei III, who was known as Tom.

They aggressively attacked childhood leukemia by developing a cocktail of four drugs given at the same time – a technique similar to three-drug therapy used to treat tuberculosis – so that each one attacks a different aspect of the cancer’s physiology in cells.

“It was crazy,” said Dr. Free to Mr. Gladwell. “But smart and right. I thought about it and knew it would work. It was like the platelets. It should work! “

But not without danger and worry. Some of the children almost died from the drugs. Critics named Dr. Freireich was inhuman because he had experimented with his young patients.

“Instead, 90 percent went into remission immediately,” he told USA Today in 2015. “It was magical.” But temporarily. One round of the cocktail wasn’t enough to clear all of the cancer. Dr. Freireich and his team treated her monthly with the medication for more than a year.

When he and Dr. Frei received the renowned Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award in 1972, the proportion of children who lived at least five years after being diagnosed with leukemia was 30 percent. According to the American Cancer Society, survival rates today are on regimens similar to those of Dr. Freireich and Dr. Free at 90 percent. Dr. Frei died in 2013.

Emil J Freireich was born on March 16, 1927 in Chicago. His mother Mary (Klein) Freireich worked many hours in a sweat shop after her husband David died at the age of 2. He was placed in the care of an Irish maid who became his surrogate mother. Shortly after he was nine years old, his mother remarried and quit her job. She and her new husband released the maid.

“I never forgave my mother for this,” said Dr. Free to Mr. Gladwell.

He was an excellent physicist in high school, where he won first prize in a science competition. His physics teacher encouraged him to go to college where his goal was to be a general practitioner like the one who treated his family.

“He worked for nothing and always wore a suit and tie and always looked so dignified,” said Dr. Freireich the online publication of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 2015.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in medicine from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1947, he received his medical degree from the University of Chicago’s College of Medicine, also in Chicago, in 1949.

His internship at Cook County Hospital, also in Chicago, ended after confronting a nurse for taking a patient with heart failure to what is known as the “death room” instead of keeping him on the ward where Dr. Freireich had treated him. He has been called a “troublemaker,” he said.

He then served his residency at the nearby Presbyterian Hospital (now part of Rush University Medical Center) and then moved to Boston for a fellowship at a hospital where he studied anemia. There he met a nurse, Haroldine Lee Cunningham, whom he married in 1953.

He was drafted into the Army in 1953 but was able to join the United States Public Health Service and work for the NCI, a branch of the National Institutes of Health.

When they first met, Dr. Zubrod, his boss: “Freireich, what are you doing?”

“I’m a hematologist,” recalled Dr. Freireich and watched Dr. Zubrod scratched his head and said, “Freireich, you should cure acute leukemia in children.”

And I said, “Yes sir.”

After a decade of developing therapies for childhood leukemia at the NCI, Dr. Freireich (and Dr. Frei) recruited to MD Anderson in 1965. Together, they formed the Developmental Therapeutics Division and hired scientists to develop drug combinations for different cancers, including adult leukemia, lymphoma, and Hodgkin’s disease, using the same methods used to treat childhood leukemia.

Because of his larger than life personality and his magnetism, Freireich attracted people from all over the world to study with him, ”said Dr. Kantarjian.

Dr. Freireich retired in 2015, but continued to teach and advise at MD Anderson.

In addition to his wife and wife Freireich-Bier, Dr. Freireich another daughter, Lindsay Freireich; two sons, David and Tom; six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Freireich compared the early battle to cure childhood leukemia to a battle in which he and the NCI team had an alliance that was “forged under attack”.

To cure cancer, he added, “Motivate and empower people, people are naturally motivated. Nobody likes to be lazy and do nothing. Everyone wants to be important. “

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Within the Vaccine Scramble, Most cancers Sufferers Are Left Behind

In the Vaccine Scramble, Cancer Patients Are Left Behind

“This was a complete – I’m not going to say disaster, but it was pretty close,” said Dr. Hanny Al-Samkari, hematologist and clinical investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Cancer patients get “mixed news,” he said, and the guidance they receive depends largely on their condition. Every day, he receives a barrage of messages from patients asking if they still qualify for the vaccine (in his state the answer is mostly no). They drove four hours to find a vaccination site. “It’s the Wild West,” he said.

He urged cancer patients to contact their doctors to coordinate the timing of the vaccine according to their treatment, unless they are in remission, have been treated a long time ago, or are receiving only hormonal treatment for breast or breast cancer Prostate cancer, said Dr. Tomasz Beer, professor in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University and assistant director of the school’s Knight Cancer Institute.

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Answers to your vaccine questions

Am I eligible for the Covid vaccine in my state?

Currently more than 150 million people – almost half of the population – can be vaccinated. But each state makes the final decision on who goes first. The country’s 21 million healthcare workers and three million long-term care residents were the first to qualify. In mid-January, federal officials asked all states to open eligibility to anyone over 65 and adults of any age with medical conditions that are at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying of Covid-19. Adults in the general population are at the end of the line. If federal and state health authorities can remove bottlenecks in the distribution of vaccines, everyone over the age of 16 is eligible as early as spring or early summer. The vaccine has not been approved in children, although studies are ongoing. It can take months before a vaccine is available to anyone under the age of 16. For the latest information on vaccination guidelines in your area, see your state health website

Is the Vaccine Free?

You shouldn’t have to pay anything out of pocket to get the vaccine, despite being asked for insurance information. If you don’t have insurance, you should still get the vaccine for free. Congress passed law this spring banning insurers from applying cost-sharing such as a co-payment or deductible. It consisted of additional safeguards prohibiting pharmacies, doctors, and hospitals from charging patients, including uninsured patients. Even so, health experts fear that patients will end up in loopholes that make them prone to surprise bills. This may be the case for people who are charged a doctor’s visit fee with their vaccine, or for Americans who have certain types of health insurance that are not covered by the new regulations. When you get your vaccine from a doctor’s office or emergency clinic, talk to them about possible hidden costs. To make sure you don’t get a surprise invoice, it is best to get your vaccine from a Department of Health vaccination center or local pharmacy as soon as the shots become more widely available.

Can I choose which vaccine to get?How long does the vaccine last? Do I need another next year?

That is to be determined. It is possible that Covid-19 vaccinations will become an annual event just like the flu vaccination. Or the vaccine may last longer than a year. We’ll have to wait and see how durable the protection from the vaccines is. To determine this, researchers will track down vaccinated people to look for “breakthrough cases” – those people who get Covid-19 despite being vaccinated. This is a sign of a weakening of protection and gives researchers an indication of how long the vaccine will last. They will also monitor the levels of antibodies and T cells in the blood of people who have been vaccinated to see if and when a booster shot might be needed. It is conceivable that people might need boosters every few months, once a year, or just every few years. It’s just a matter of waiting for the data.

Does my employer need vaccinations?Where can I find out more?

For example, those receiving chemotherapy might have the best chances of developing an immune response if the vaccine is given if their white blood cell counts aren’t at their lowest levels, said Dr. Beer. The recommendations for patients with leukemia or lymphoma who are under treatment or who have recently had a bone marrow transplant are particularly complex and absolutely require consultation and coordination with an oncologist, he stressed.

While some are concerned about the risk of encountering a crowd at a mass vaccination site, Dr. Al-Samkari instructs patients to receive doses wherever they are available, as long as they wear masks and keep their distance from other people. “Fears are clearly well founded,” he said. “But we have to get shots in the arms.”

In general, people with cancer should get the vaccine “as soon as possible, wherever they can,” said Dr. Carol Ann Huff, clinical director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins and one of the authors of the Cancer Network’s National Comprehensive Guidelines on Covid-19 Vaccines for Cancer Patients. There are some caveats: Patients on a bone marrow transplant or CAR-T therapy should wait at least three months before receiving the vaccine, she said.

However, depending on the level of virus transmission in the patient community, it may be safer to wait to receive the vaccine. If there is high levels of transmission in the community, “the risks might outweigh the benefits of waiting,” said Dr. Beer. Patients with active cancer should contact their oncologist before receiving the vaccine. He advised unless they are in remission, have been treated a long time ago, or are just receiving hormonal treatment for breast or prostate cancer.

Those who take part in cancer clinical trials have a grimmer guide to vaccination. Allyson Harkey, 46, from Maryland, has stage four kidney cancer and is in an immunotherapy study. She said her doctor wasn’t sure she should get the vaccine. The National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines generally recommend that patients receiving immunotherapy receive the vaccine as soon as it becomes available. However, you should consult with your doctor beforehand as there are so many different studies out there. She feels like she is in a state of limbo, waiting for more information – a process made more frustrating by what she thinks is a ticking clock. “My prognosis is not good. I probably have a few more years, ”she said. “It’s really hard to spend this time because I know I don’t have much time left, just in my house.”

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When the Most cancers Physician Leaves

When the Cancer Doctor Leaves

Some were angry. Unbeknownst to me, my hospital, which has always been efficient, had sent out a letter informing patients of my departure and giving them the opportunity to choose one of eight other doctors to take care of them – even before I had a chance, some to inform person from them. How should they choose and why hadn’t I told them I would go, they indignantly demanded.

Feeling just like my patients, I quickly sent out my own follow-up letter choosing a specialist in their specific cancers and telling my patients I would miss them.

I personally apologized for the first letter for weeks.

And although I always tell my patients that the best gift I could ever hope for is their good health, many brought gifts or cards.

A man in his sixties had just received another round of chemotherapy for a leukemia that kept coming back. I think we both knew that the next time the leukemia returned, it would stay here. When I walked into his exam room, he greeted me where my other patient had left off.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me.”

Before I could even sit down, he handed me a simple brown bag with white tissue paper sticking out from the top and asked me to remove the contents.

Inside was a drawing of the steel truss arches of Cleveland’s I-90 Innerbelt Bridge, above which the city skyline rose.

“It’s beautiful,” I told him. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You can hang this on your office wall in Miami,” he suggested and started to cry. “This is how you will always remember Cleveland.” And then, covid-19 precautionary damn, he went over and gave me a big bear hug. After a few seconds we parted.

“No,” I said, ripping open. “I’ll hang the picture and I’ll always remember you.”

Mikkael Sekeres (@mikkaelsekeres), former director of the Leukemia Program at Cleveland Clinic, is the director of the hematology department at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, Miller School of Medicine, University of Miami and author of When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons From Leukemia. “