Publications by authors named "Catania C"
Objectives: We previously showed that men with melanoma harboring BRAF mutations had significantly lower benefit from targeted therapy as compared with women Here we explored the hypothesis that such gender-based dimorphism in the efficacy of BRAF-pathway blockade extends to other tumor histotypes carrying pathogenic BRAF-mutations.
Methods: We retrospectively analyzed data from a cohort of patients with advanced colorectal-cancer (CRC) harboring BRAF V600E mutations, treated with anti-EGFR/BRAF/MEK targeted therapy. The primary objective was to assess the association between gender and outcome of patients treated with targeted therapy, in terms of overall response rate (ORR), progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS).
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- The study evaluates various deconvolution methods that estimate immune cell levels in tumor samples based on gene expression data during a DREAM Challenge.
- While many established methods perform adequately for most immune cell types, they struggle with accurately assessing all states of functional CD8+ T cells.
- Community-contributed methods, particularly a deep learning approach, have shown promising results and could enhance the development of deconvolution techniques, especially in identifying functional CD4+ T cell states.
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- * A multicenter study reanalyzed the effectiveness of LEV vs. LTG, revealing that LTG had significantly lower treatment failure rates and better medication retention than LEV.
- * Both medications had similar safety profiles, and while there were no notable differences in achieving total seizure freedom, LTG showed a strong likelihood of being superior for overall treatment effectiveness.
Background: The outcome of patients with metastatic tumors who discontinued immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) not for progressive disease (PD) has been poorly explored. We performed a meta-analysis of all studies reporting the clinical outcome of patients who discontinued ICIs for reasons other than PD.
Methods: We searched PubMed, Embase and Scopus databases, from the inception of each database to December 2023, for clinical trials (randomized or not) and observational studies assessing PD-(L)1 and CTLA-4 inhibitors in patients with metastatic solid tumors who discontinued treatment for reasons other than PD.
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- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies increased carbon dioxide levels from human activities as the main cause of global climate change, emphasizing the need for technologies to reduce carbon footprints.
- Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) technologies, including CO2-Enhanced processes and well rehabilitation methods like Aqua Freed and Aqua Gard, are recognized for their potential in sequestering carbon dioxide underground.
- The study shows that these technologies can inject significant amounts of CO2 into wells, with an estimated 82-96% of that carbon remaining securely in the subsurface, indicating a substantial annual storage capacity in the US.
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- The study aimed to identify factors that predict seizure recurrence in women of childbearing age with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) who switched from valproate (VPA) to alternative antiseizure medications (ASMs) like levetiracetam (LEV) and lamotrigine (LTG).
- Researchers evaluated data from 426 women across 16 epilepsy centers, finding that common reasons for switching medications included concerns about teratogenicity and that around a quarter of the women experienced worsening or recurrence of seizures within 12 and 24 months.
- The analysis revealed that LEV was associated with a lower risk of seizure recurrence or worsening compared to LTG, providing potential guidance for treatment options after VPA discontinuation.
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- Spinal cord pathology significantly contributes to disability in progressive multiple sclerosis, with demyelinated lesions being a key feature tying directly to patient outcomes.
- A study of 119 confirmed MS cases revealed that 76.5% had at least one spinal cord lesion, predominantly affecting the cervical region and showing high levels of inflammation.
- The research suggests that lesion patterns are influenced by the vascular network within the spinal cord, indicating that blood-related factors may play a central role in lesion development and progression of the disease.
Regulatory agencies have recently discouraged the prescription of topiramate (TPM) to women of childbearing potential with epilepsy due to growing evidence of the teratogenic and neurodevelopmental risks associated with its use during pregnancy. It remains, however, unclear whether the use of TPM in this population can be supported to some extent by its high effectiveness. In this multicenter, retrospective, cohort study performed at 22 epilepsy centers, we investigated the comparative effectiveness of TPM and levetiracetam (LEV) given as first-line antiseizure medication in a cohort of women of childbearing potential with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Despite several therapeutic efforts, lung cancer remains a highly lethal disease. Novel therapeutic approaches encompass immune-checkpoint inhibitors, targeted therapeutics and antibody-drug conjugates, with different results. Several studies have been aimed at identifying biomarkers able to predict benefit from these therapies and create a prediction model of response, despite this there is a lack of information to help clinicians in the choice of therapy for lung cancer patients with advanced disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: To provide evidence explaining the poor association between pCR and patients' long-term outcome at trial-level in neoadjuvant RCTs for breast cancer (BC), we performed a systematic-review and meta-analysis of all RCTs testing neoadjuvant treatments for early-BC and reporting the hazard ratio of DFS (HR) for the intervention versus control arm stratified by pathological response type (i.e., pCR yes versus no).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Sotorasib showed a significant improvement of progression free survival (PFS), safety and quality of life over docetaxel in patients with KRASp.G12C-mutated advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) within the CodeBreak-200 study. Here we report real-world efficacy and tolerability data from NSCLC patients who received sotorasib within the Italian expanded access program (EAP).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Squamous cell carcinoma of the anus (SCCA) is a rare tumor. While most patients with locally advanced disease are cured with chemo-radiotherapy, about a quarter eventually experience metastatic recurrence. Standard treatment for advanced disease is chemotherapy, but recently evidence on the activity of immunotherapy has been reported.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAfter decades of research, improving the efficacy of adjuvant endocrine therapy (ET) for early-stage breast cancer becomes increasingly difficult. Beyond technological breakthroughs and the availability of new classes of drugs, further improvement of adjuvant ET will require applying a rigorous research approach in poorly investigated areas. We critically discuss some key principles that should inform future research to improve ET efficacy, including identifying specific subgroups of patients who can benefit from escalating or de-escalating approaches, optimizing available and new treatment strategies for different clinical contexts, and dissecting the direct and indirect biological effects of therapeutic interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Epilepsy with generalized tonic-clonic seizures alone (GTCA) is a common but poorly characterized idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) syndrome. Hence, we investigated electroclinical features, seizure outcome, and antiseizure medication (ASM) withdrawal in a large cohort of GTCA patients.
Methods: In this multicenter retrospective study, GTCA patients defined according to the diagnostic criteria of the International League Against Epilepsy (2022) were included.
Importance: After the recent limitations to prescribing valproate, many studies have highlighted the challenging management of female patients of reproductive age with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). However, no study, to the authors' knowledge, has addressed the comparative effectiveness of alternative antiseizure medications (ASMs) in these patients.
Objective: To compare the effectiveness and safety of levetiracetam and lamotrigine as initial monotherapy in female patients of childbearing age with IGE.
Article Synopsis
- After the PACIFIC trial, the combination of concurrent chemo-radiotherapy followed by 1 year of durvalumab for unresectable NSCLC (non-small cell lung cancer) has become the standard treatment, particularly for patients with a PD-L1 score of ≥ 1%.
- New challenges have emerged in clinical practice, including how to treat patients with specific genetic mutations, manage disease recurrence after surgery, and address cases where patients progress during or after durvalumab therapy.
- A multidisciplinary approach is crucial for managing stage III NSCLC, emphasizing the need for tumor genotyping and re-biopsy for optimal treatment planning and distinguishing between curable and non-curable recurrences.
Patients diagnosed with relapsed/refractory (R/R) diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) or high-grade B cell lymphoma (HGBL) may achieve prolonged survival following receipt of high-dose chemotherapy/autologous stem cell transplantation (HDC/ASCT) or CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor modified T cell therapy (CART19). Although early results from randomized clinical trials suggest that assignment to CART19 versus salvage immunochemotherapy as second-line therapy results in improved survival, analysis of a large series of patients who actually received HDC/ASCT or CART19 has yet to be performed. Such an analysis may inform future research efforts to optimize the risk stratification of R/R DLBCL/HGBL patients who are candidates for either therapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSmall-cell lung cancer (SCLC) transformation from EGFR mutant adenocarcinoma is a rare entity that is considered to be a new phenotype of SCLC. While transformation from adenocarcinoma (ADC) with EGFR exon 19 deletions and exon 21 L858R point mutations has been described, to our knowledge, no cases of transformation to SCLC from exon-18-mutated ADC have been reported. We reported a clinical case of a patient with exon-18-EGFR-transformed SCLC, and we performed a systematic review of the literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAvailable evidence suggests that in patients with advanced BRAF V600-mutant melanoma treated with the combination of BRAF and MEK inhibitors, gender could be associated with survival outcome. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomized clinical trials (RCTs) testing the combination of BRAF and MEK inhibitors, to assess the interaction between treatment effect and patients' gender. We searched PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, and Scopus, for phase II and III RCTs up to January 30, 2022.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Controversy exists regarding the optimal duration of the extended adjuvant endocrine treatment (ET) in patients with early-stage breast-cancer (eBC). We performed a systematic review and trial-level meta-analysis of all randomized clinical trials (RCTs) comparing a "limited-extended" adjuvant ET (defined as more than 5 but less than 7.5 years of treatment overall) versus a "full-extended" adjuvant ET (defined as more than 7.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: We reported the efficacy and safety results of high-dose, continuous-infusion Ifosfamide,in patients with advanced thymoma (TM) and thymic carcinoma (TC).
Methods: This was a multicentric, prospective study in patients with advanced TM or TC, who had progressed after at least one line of platinum-based chemotherapy. Previous treatment with an anti-angiogenesis or anti-PD(L)1 was allowed.
Background: Pivotal trials of COVID-19 vaccines did not include cancer patients with questions remaining in this population. Particularly in patients with thoracic malignancies receiving anticancer treatments, the safety of these vaccines has so far been little investigated.
Methods: This is a prospective trial of patients with thoracic cancer receiving anticancer treatments and COVID-19 vaccines at the Division of Thoracic Oncology of European Institute of Oncology between February and September 2021.
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- Patients with refractory myeloid malignancies have a poor prognosis, and traditional allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) with myeloablative conditioning (MAC) has high relapse and mortality rates.
- A new MAC regimen combining clofarabine and busulfan (Clo/Bu4) shows promise, especially for patients up to 70 years old, with a retrospective study identifying positive outcomes in a real-world setting.
- Among 69 patients treated between 2012 and 2020, those with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) achieved notable event-free survival rates, with 72.5% in complete remission at day 100 post-transplant