Dr. Lauren Weinand

New data released from the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa show that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine may be less effective at preventing infection by the Omicron variant. This study offers the first glimpse into how mRNA vaccines fare against the new variant. The study was conducted by mixing live Omicron virus with sera...

Written by Nikki Meyer Edited by Lauren Weinand, M.D. This retrospective study, published in Blood, and presented at the 2021 ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition, examined pre-apheresis absolute lymphocyte count (PA-ALC) and post-transplant ALC (PT-ALC) for patients with relapsed/refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) who had received autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant (auto-HCT). The researchers sought to evaluate the...

Written by Nikki Meyer Edited by Lauren Weinand, M.D. Patients with cancer are a critical group in which to analyze COVID-19 vaccine response. This observational study, published in Blood, and presented at the 2021 ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition, examined COVID-19 vaccine response in patients with non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHL) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who received the...

Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic/Latino individuals. Black individuals face a higher risk of developing NMOSD and an increased associated mortality from NMOSD. Moreover, Black and Hispanic/Latino individuals face greater disease severity and faster disease progression than white individuals. Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern...

Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) and multiple sclerosis (MS) are two different autoimmune disorders that share several similarities. Both disorders attack the central nervous system (CNS) and have some of the same symptoms, such as blurry vision, numbness, tingling, and limb weakness. In fact, the disorders are so similar that 42.5% of patients with NMOSD...

Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) is a rare autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS). It primarily affects the optic nerves and spinal cord. NMOSD is most common among non-white women in their 30s and 40s [1]. It affects approximately 15,000 people in the United States. Like many autoimmune disorders, there is still much...

The pathologic response assessment of tumor specimens from patients undergoing systemic treatment provides an early indication of therapeutic efficacy. It predicts long-term survival as well. Grading systems for pathologic response were first developed for chemotherapy in select tumor types. However, the immunotherapeutic agents work differently from chemotherapeutic agents. Hence, a pan-tumor standardized scoring system for immune-related...

Researchers across the United States recently used an oncology simulation model to estimate the survival of patients with classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) for 10 years after treatment. Specifically, the study sought to estimate the future number of patients with stage III or IV cHL who are alive and progression-free over 10 years for patients who...

A new retrospective analysis of pediatric patients with relapsed/refractory (R/R) Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), published in Blood, will be presented at the 2021 ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition. While there is a phase 3 randomized controlled trial supporting the use of brentuximab vedotin (BV) in adults with R/R HL after receiving autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT),...