Yale Cancer Center study finds new treatment options for patients with aggressive blood cancer

More than 20000 patients breast cancer and nearly 2000 UCLA blood cancer patients were enrolled in an ongoing clinical trial by the Yale Cancer Center (YCC) in 2019.

The multi-institutional study investigated the strategy of combining a drug inhibitor with checkpoint blockade in patients with or at risk for advanced recurrent or triple-negative cancer.

Obtaining OutcomesStrong and positive predictive value the study enrolled nearly 340 patients from 4 cohort centers in four regions of the United States: Boston California; San Francisco California; Los Angeles California; Chicago Illinois; and Detroit Michigan.

Our study provides evidence to support the efficacy of combining a drug inhibitor with checkpoint blockade in patients with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) a common and frequently encountered pathogen in blood and bone marrow cells and in those patients who have antibodies for HIV infection said senior author Dr. Theodore Drenan of Yale University noted.

Long-term efficacy was demonstrated by 30 percent of the enrolled patient population who exceeded the first treatment with about one in five achieving undetectable viral RNA levels and no detectable viral replication or viral load. HIV RNA level was detectable in approximately five percent of enrolled patients after their first dose with lopinavir-ritonavir and ritonavir as monotherapy.

In a post hoc analysis approximately 75 percent of those who became HIV positive at enrollment achieved viral load within a certain range. Viral load was detectable in 1. 2 to 1. 8 percent of patients who received either ritonavir or lopinavir-ritonavir.

The results in this randomized placebo-controlled study supported the finding that contributes toward the understanding of the efficacy of these agents for the treatment of advanced or recurrent prostate cancer said Daniela Heidenreich of Ludwig Institute for Human Biology and San Diego California.

The combined agent has potential to impact the current contraindications for patients with HIV in clinical trials but had not been tested for HIV efficacy in lopinavir-ritonavir and ritonavir-ritonavir in clinical trials said Dr. John Solomon chief of Sloan Ketterings research programs in Stem Cell Translocation Biology and Protein Products and Mount Sinais Blood Center for Precision Biomedicine.

Alzheimers experience in patients with blood cancers is common.

–Dr. Solomon noted an old observation that young healthy people who carry the disease dont develop Alzheimers.

For the present study the researchers sought to address this observation developing a lab-based trial-based multiple-center study to test different treatment strategies for patients with blood cancers that are just beginning to show signs of progression.