Medical Bulletin 8/April/2023

Here are the top medical news for the day:

Study finds spread of COVID-19 in households to be linked to virus on hands and surfaces

A new Imperial College London-led study provides the first empirical evidence for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via people’s hands and frequently touched household surfaces.

The research sheds new light on the spread of COVID-19 in households, where most transmission of SARS-CoV-2 occurs, and it is the first to link the presence of SARS-CoV-2 on people’s hands and frequently touched household surfaces to the risk of infection among contacts. The findings support the use of interventions at home when someone has an infection, in particular frequent handwashing, regular surface disinfection, and physical distancing as well as the use of masks to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Reference:

Professor Ajit Lalvani et al,IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON,The Lancet Microbe

New immunotherapy agent safe and promising against high-risk prostate cancers

Enoblituzumab, a monoclonal antibody drug works by binding to a protein called B7-H3 that is overexpressed on prostate cancer cells and believed to impede the immune system’s ability to attack cancer cells.

The new drug is safe in men with aggressive prostate cancer and may induce clinical activity against cancer throughout the body, according to a phase 2 study led by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. If confirmed in additional studies, enoblituzumab could become the first promising antibody-based immunotherapy agent against prostate cancer.

Reference:

Eugene Shenderov et al,Nature Medicine,doi 10.1038/s41591-023-02284-w

Study reveals why viruses like SARS-CoV-2 can reinfect hosts, evade the immune response

Despite our ability to create a range of antibodies to target viruses, humans create antibodies that target the same viral regions again and again, according to a new study led by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and Harvard Medical School. These “public epitopes” mean that the generation of new antibodies is far from random and that a virus may be able to mutate a single amino acid to reinfect a population of previously immune hosts. The team’s findings, which have implications for our understanding of immunity and public health, are published in Science.

“Our research may help explain a lot of the patterns we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in terms of re-infection,” said corresponding author Stephen J. Elledge, PhD, the Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics at the Brigham and HMS. “Our findings could help inform immune predictions and may change the way people think about immune strategies.”

Reference:

Shrock EL et al. “Germline-encoded amino acid-binding motifs drive immunodominant public antibody responses” Science DOI: 10.1126/science.adc9498