Medical Bulletin 2/June/2023

Here are the top medical news for the day:

Liver dialysis device safe and effective for treating severe liver failure

The first successful in-patient trial of1 liver dialysis* has been completed by researchers from 2UCL, the Royal Free Hospital, UCL spin-out Yaqrit and their collaborators.

3The DIALIVE device, invented by researchers at UCL’s Institute for Liver and Digestive Health, was found to be safe and was associated with substantial improvement in the severity of symptoms and organ function in a greater proportion of 4patients with acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF), when compared with patients receiving standard of care.

Reference:

Banwari Agarwal, Rafael Bañares Cañizares and Faouzi Saliba et al. ‘Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trial of the DIALIVE Liver Dialysis Device versus Standard of Care in patients with Acute on Chronic Liver Failure’ is published in The Journal of Hepatology and is strictly embargoed until 31 May 2023 at 23:01 BST / 18:01 EDT.,DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2023.03.013

Two years after confirmed infection more than 1 in 6 unvaccinated people report health effects of COVID

Around 1 in 6 unvaccinated individuals say they are still experiencing health effects of covid-19 up to two years after infection, finds a study from Switzerland published by The BMJ today. The findings show that 17% of participants did not return to normal health and 18% reported covid-19 related symptoms 24 months after initial infection.

Their findings are based on 1 1,106 unvaccinated adults (average age 50) with a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection between 6 August 2020 and 19 January 2021 and 628 adults (average age 65) randomly selected from the general population who had not had the virus.

Reference:

Recovery and symptom trajectories up to two years after SARS-CoV-2

 Immune checkpoint inhibitors’ anti-tumor response improvement and minimizing side effects

Scientists at Tohoku University have discovered a novel approach that improves the efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) - a novel form of cancer treatment utilizing immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) - and minimizes the associated side effects. They demonstrated that using ICIs to target tumor-positive lymph nodes generates a robust anti-tumor response against both local and systemic metastases.

The research team hypothesized that metastatic lymph node-targeted ICB could improve the anti-tumor response while uncoupling it from irAEs.

Reference:

Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research,DOI 10.1186/s13046-023-02645-w