Citations

Objectives: Anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) is a rare and aggressive type of thyroid malignancy with a very poor prognosis and outcome despite therapy. The rarity of this disease and the poor functional status of ATC patients limit the ability to conduct clinical trials, thus there is a lack of large, controlled trials to guide treatment and evaluate the benefit of combined modality therapy. Methods: The National Cancer Database (NCDB) was queried for patients diagnosed with ATC at age 18 or older between 2004 and 2018. After excluding patients with unknown number of treatment modalities, Charlson-Deyo score—a weighted summary of 17 chronic disease categories where higher scores denote greater baseline comorbidity burden—of 3 or more and patients lost for follow-up, we split the cohort into 3 groups according to the number of treatment modalities they received. Treatment modalities included surgery, radiation, and systemic therapy. Then, we evaluated the overall survival (OS) between the 3 groups. We studied the OS using Kaplan-Meier estimates and multivariate Cox regression analyses to evaluate factors associated with OS. In addition, propensity score matching (accounting for age, sex, race, Charlson-Deyo score, and clinical M stage) was used for more robust results. Results: A total of 3460 patients with ATC were included in the analysis, of which 1472 (42.5%) either received one type of therapy or did not receive any therapy (group 1), 1092 (31.6%) received bimodal therapy (group 2), and 896 (25.9%) received trimodal therapy (group 3). We found that group 3 had better OS compared with group 1 and group 2 (median OS 9.1 vs. 1.7 and 4.9 mo, respectively, with P <0.001 for all comparisons). Propensity score matching yielded 896 patients in each group. We found that group 3 had better OS compared with group 1 and group 2 (median OS 9.1 vs. 1.9 and 5.2 mo, respectively, with P <0.001 for all comparisons). Same trend was found in subgroup analysis when we split the cohort according to the metastatic status; in M0 group (median OS was 10.4 vs. 1.9 and 6.1 mo, respectively, with P <0.001 for all), in M1 group (median OS was 5.9 vs. 1.4 and 3.7 mo, respectively, with P <0.001 for all). Modality-specific analyses further demonstrated that surgery, radiation, and systemic therapy each independently prolonged OS in both M0 and M1 cohorts (all P <0.001). These individual benefits explain the additive advantage of trimodal therapy and underscore that offering at least one evidence-based modality is preferable when comprehensive treatment is infeasible. On multivariate analysis, group 1 and group 2 were associated with worse OS compared with trimodal treatment (HR: 2.721; 95% CI: 2.466-3.002 and HR: 1.434; 95% CI: 1.299-1.582, P <0.001 for all). Conclusions: Patients with ATC who were treated with intensive trimodal therapy had statistically significant improvement in OS compared with patients who received less intense therapy. This survival benefit was observed in both metastatic and nonmetastatic groups. Although we acknowledge the limitations of this retrospective analysis, our results showed the critical role of an intensive therapy approach in this aggressive malignancy.

Objective: In this study, we evaluate the utility of ctDNA analysis in a large cohort of patients for whom ctDNA testing was ordered commercially with real-world application. Summary Background Data: Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) has emerged as a prognostic and predictive biomarker for assessing post-surgical molecular residual disease (MRD) and response to treatment. Methods: A real-world data analysis was performed using commercial ctDNA testing (SignateraTM) from patients (N=795, n=5,971 plasma samples) with stage I-III colon cancer treated at multiple US institutions. The association of ctDNA detection within the MRD window, during surveillance, and the impact of ACT was correlated with patient outcomes. Results: ctDNA-positive patients during the MRD window and surveillance showed significantly shorter DFS compared to ctDNA-negative patients (hazard ratio (HR): 9.85, P<0.0001; HR: 26.91, P<0.0001). Multivariate analysis of the MRD window revealed ctDNA-positivity as the most significant factor associated with inferior DFS (adjHR: 7.7, P<0.001). MRD-positive patients who received ACT showed improved DFS compared to patients observed post-surgery (adjHR: 6.1, FDR adj P=0.0007). No ACT benefit was observed in MRD-negative patients (adj HR: 1.20, FDR adj P=0.768). On evaluating ctDNA dynamics from MRD to surveillance, patients who remained ctDNA-positive or converted from negative to positive showed a significantly inferior DFS (HR: 34.40, P<0.0001; HR: 13.65, P<0.0001) compared to persistently ctDNA-negative patients. Conclusions: Postsurgical ctDNA detection is prognostic of relapse and potentially predictive of ACT benefit in patients with resectable colon cancer, which may enable personalized surveillance, intervention, and/or trial options, ultimately improving patient outcomes.

Omalizumab, an anti-IgE monoclonal antibody, is a standard treatment for chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU). In India, an ‘intended-copy biosimilar’ (ICB) was introduced in 2020, based on structural similarity, without clinical trials. This case series compares the efficacy and safety of ICBs with the original biologic. A retrospective review of nine patients with CSU (mean age 37.1 years) who switched from omalizumab to an ICB due to the unavailability of omalizumab. Disease control was assessed using the Urticaria Activity Score and the Urticaria Control Test. Findings highlight the need for rigorous biosimilar testing and standardized nomenclature to distinguish biosimilar types.

Abstract Background Research is limited on the impacts of menopause, defined as the permanent cessation of ovarian function and decline of reproductive hormones, on gastrointestinal symptom severity and disease progression in women with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This review synthesizes current evidence on the impact of menopause, menopause transition, and hormonal therapy (HT) on disease activity, IBD and menopause symptom severity, and disease progression among individuals with IBD. Methods A systematic literature review was reported following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines and preregistered at PROSPERO (CRD42024564901). Five databases were searched without date restrictions. Data extraction and risk-of-bias assessment were performed independently by multiple reviewers. Results were qualitatively synthesized. Results Of 1667 records, 15 studies met inclusion criteria (5 cohort, 3 case-control, 7 cross-sectional) with IBD sample sizes from 37 to 1367. Evidence on HT and IBD risk was mixed: some studies linked HT to increased ulcerative colitis risk while others found no significant association after adjusting for confounders. Women with IBD experience earlier menopause than healthy control subjects. While most women reported no change in IBD symptoms postmenopause, a minority reported symptom worsening. HT may reduce flare severity. Women with IBD reported more severe vulvovaginal symptoms and had distinct vaginal microbiome profiles compared with healthy control subjects. Conclusions Few studies have explored the relationship between menopause and IBD. There is a need for continued research on the relationship between IBD disease activity and menopause symptoms to create tailored interventions to improve women’s health with IBD across the lifespan.

Pharmacogenomics (PGx) has the potential to improve prescribing practices. In 2012, our institution developed a multidisciplinary program to implement PGx-CDS to support the clinical practice. CDS has been implemented for 45 drug-gene interactions, in 42,000 patients with PGx tests results, and in 2023, approximately 9281 CDS interventions have triggered at the time of prescribing. The program has been successful.

The objective is to create an automated knowledge extraction tool for cancer research that builds high-quality academic corpora for LLM fine-tuning while investigating its effectiveness in interleukin-6 and bladder cancer domains. To address the current gap in knowledge retrieval techniques for cancer research data collection, we propose KnowledgePipeline, a novel automated tool that incorporates diverse aspects of academic papers and metadata. Our tool integrates content, co-citations, and co-authorship networks to construct domain-specific academic corpora suitable for fine-tuning LLMs. We leverage two LLMs (GPTJ-6.7B and Galactica30B) trained on domain-specific question-answer pairs from the refined data. The system’s evaluation focuses on both the quality of extracted knowledge and the performance of fine-tuned models in open-ended question-answering tasks. We see that KnowledgePipeline offers a scalable, automated framework for domain-specific knowledge retrieval and fine-tuned applications in cancer research, advancing literature discovery and addressing critical biomedical challenges. It achieved high relevance scores of 68% for IL-6 and 74.5% for bladder cancer, with a fine-tuned Galactica-30B model demonstrating promising capabilities.

Effective healthcare referral triage poses a significant challenge, especially extracting referral notes on time for scheduling. To offset this issue, this study aims to develop an optimized Random Forest classifier to recreate the referral notes content and identify patients requiring Spinal Cord Stimulation procedures. A performance index was introduced to improve accuracy, while a consistency index was designed to prevent overfitting. The optimized classifier, with the optimal selection at the number of estimates being 5 trees and tree depth being 4, achieved an accuracy of 0.74 with a lower standard deviation, demonstrating its reliability and effectiveness.