Medical Reference Tools and Pharmaceutical Promotion: A History of Entanglement.

Reference tools are often uncritically accepted as balanced, objective, definitive, and evidence-based guides to medical knowledge. Yet for centuries textbooks and manuals have been entangled in various ways with industry interests. This essay shows how reference tools have served as sites of pharmaceutical promotion.

Evolution of myeloid-mediated immunotherapy resistance in prostate cancer.

Patients with advanced metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) are refractory to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), partly because there are immunosuppressive myeloid cells in tumours. However, the heterogeneity of myeloid cells has made them difficult to target, making blockade of the colony stimulating factor-1 receptor (CSF1R) clinically ineffective. Here we use single-cell profiling on patient biopsies across the disease continuum and find that a distinct population of tumour-associated macrophages with elevated levels of SPP1 transcripts (SPP1-TAMs) becomes enriched with the progression of prostate cancer to mCRPC.

Precision in Immune Management: Balancing Steroid Exposure, Rejection Risk, and Infectious Outcomes in Adult Kidney Transplant Recipients.

Background/objectives: With kidney transplant immunosuppression, physicians must balance preventing rejection with minimizing infection and malignancy risks. Steroids have been a mainstay of these immunosuppression regimens since the early days of kidney transplantation, yet their risks remain debated. Our study looks at the clinical outcomes of patients undergoing early steroid withdrawal (ESW) vs.