(This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays.)
By Nancy Lapid
April 22 (Reuters) – Twice as many advanced pancreas cancer patients who received an experimental drug developed by Actuate Therapeutics with chemotherapy were alive after one year as those treated with chemo alone, according to results of a mid-stage trial.
At one year, 44% of patients who received Actuate’s elraglusib were alive compared with 22% who received only chemotherapy, researchers reported in Nature Medicine.
In the 233-patient trial conducted in North America and Europe, about 13% of patients in the drug group were alive at two years. No one who received the standard chemotherapy treatment survived that long.
The drug reduced the risk of death during the study period by 38%, with those who received elraglusib living a median of 10.1 months, compared to 7.2 months for those who only received chemotherapy.
“Pancreatic cancer remains one of the most challenging solid tumors to treat, but these findings provide cautious optimism for patients,” study leader Dr. Devalingam Mahalingam of Northwestern University in Illinois said in a statement.
Elraglusib works by inhibiting a protein called GSK-3 beta that promotes cancer cell survival, tumor growth, and immune evasion.
“While these results will need to be confirmed in Phase 3 trials, observing survival benefit in such a difficult-to-treat cancer is encouraging,” Mahalingam said.
“Given the novel mechanism of this drug, these findings raise the possibility that it could have broader application across other tumor types.”
HUMANS STILL WRITE BETTER CLINICAL NOTES THAN AI SCRIBES
While artificial intelligence tools that generate clinical notes are changing how doctors document patient visits, humans still do it better, researchers reported in San Francisco during the American College of Physicians annual meeting.
“Ambient AI scribes” work quietly in the background, “listening” to doctor-patient conversations and summarizing the encounter in clinical notes. The primary goal is to cut down on paperwork and give doctors more time to focus on patient care.
In practice, the technology has shown potential. Studies have found that AI scribes can cut down on documentation time, reduce after-hours work, and even help doctors feel more engaged during appointments, the researchers noted.
But the study published in Annals of Internal Medicine found advantages for humans over AI, especially in areas like thoroughness, organization, and clinical usefulness.
The researchers had 11 different AI scribe systems and 18 human doctors generate patient notes from recordings of five simulated clinical visits that included background noise, masked speakers, and non-native accents.
Thirty reviewers assessed the results without knowing who wrote them. Across the board, human-written notes came out on top, with significant differences in scenarios involving back pain, chest pain, and heart failure, the researchers found.
Challenging conditions, such as noisy environments or muffled speech, made it harder for the AI systems to keep up, the researchers also found.
“AI scribes should be regarded as tools for generating draft documentation that requires review and editing, rather than as a substitute for clinician-authored notes,” the authors wrote.
WILDFIRE SMOKE MAY INCREASE THE RISK OF SEVERAL CANCERS
Exposure to wildfire smoke was associated with significantly higher risks of several types of cancer, a study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in San Diego found.
Researchers analyzed cancer incidence data from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial, which tracks new cancer diagnoses in adults across the United States who have no previous history of malignancies.
To quantify wildfire smoke exposure, the researchers assessed the fine particulate matter and black carbon in the air using ground-level air pollution data from participants’ neighborhoods, along with satellite images that helped calculate the number of days their areas of residence were exposed to the smoke.
Among 91,460 participants with data recorded between 2006 and 2018, wildfire smoke exposure was significantly associated with an increased risk of developing lung, colorectal, breast, bladder, and blood cancer, but not ovarian cancer or melanoma.
The risk of developing these cancers increased along with the level of air pollution from the fires, the researchers also found.
“For the general public, the key message is that wildfire smoke is not only a short-term respiratory or cardiovascular concern. Chronic exposure may also carry long-term cancer risks,” study leader Qizhen Wu of The University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center said in a statement.
“Notably, increased cancer risk may occur even at relatively low levels of wildfire smoke (particulate matter) commonly experienced by general populations.”
Wu also noted that the origin and contents of wildfire smoke will vary for different geographic populations, and the compounds and chemical transformations that occur in smoke as it drifts may also impact health.
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(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; additional reporting by Shawana Alleyne-Morris; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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