Enhancing safety of laparoscopic surgery in COVID-19 era: clinical experience with low-cost filtration devices.

Background: Surgery in the era of the current COVID-19 pandemic has been curtailed and restricted to emergency and certain oncological indications, and requires special attention concerning the safety of patients and health care personnel. Desufflation during or after laparoscopic surgery has been reported to entail a potential risk of contamination from 2019-nCoV through the aerosol generated during dissection and/or use of energy-driven devices. In order to protect the operating room staff, it is vital to filter the released aerosol.

Adjuvant Ovarian Suppression, High-dose Chemotherapy and Immunotherapy for Premenopausal Patients with High-risk Breast Cancer.

Background: Premenopausal patients with breast cancer and more than 10 positive axillary nodes (BC>10) have a poor prognosis: In these patients the best adjuvant therapy (CT) has not yet been established.

Patients And Methods: Forty-two BC>10 received, in sequence, the following adjuvant treatments: luteinizing hormone releasing hormone (LH-RH) analog for 5 years; anthracycline-based induction chemotherapy; radiation therapy; platinum-based high-dose CT, with autologous bone marrow transplantation; immunotherapy with interleukin 2 (IL2) and 13-cis retinoic acid (RA); anastrazole given 5 years to estrogen receptor-positive patients. Primary endpoints of the study were disease-free survival (DFS) and overall (OS) survival.

Lymphocyte counts independently predict overall survival in advanced cancer patients: a biomarker for IL-2 immunotherapy.

Interleukin-2 (IL-2) targets cells bearing IL-2 receptors and induces different degrees of lymphocytosis. This study retrospectively evaluated whether lymphocytosis, in addition to clinical characteristics at baseline and to tumor objective response, may predict overall survival in metastatic renal cell carcinoma patients who received IL-2 subcutaneously (s.c.