High-Cost Cancer Drug Use in Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare.

Importance: Medicare Advantage (MA) plans are designed to incentivize the use of less expensive drugs through capitated payments, formulary control, and preauthorizations for certain drugs. These conditions may reduce spending on high-cost therapies for conditions such as cancer, a condition that is among the most expensive to treat.

Objective: To determine whether patients insured by MA plans receive less high-cost drugs than those insured by traditional Medicare (TM).

Chemically engineered antibodies for autophagy-based receptor degradation.

Cell surface receptor-targeted protein degraders hold promise for drug discovery. However, their application is restricted because of the complexity of creating bifunctional degraders and the reliance on specific lysosome-shuttling receptors or E3 ubiquitin ligases. To address these limitations, we developed an autophagy-based plasma membrane protein degradation platform, which we term AUTABs (autophagy-inducing antibodies).

[Clinical and genetic characteristics analysis of two children with comorbidity of two rare genetic diseases].

Objective: To explore the clinical and genetic characteristics of two children diagnosed with two rare genetic diseases simultaneously.

Methods: Two children with comorbidity of two genetic diseases due to dual genetic mutations diagnosed at the Third Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University respectively in May 2022 and March 2023 were selected as the study subjects. Clinical and genetic data of the two children were retrospectively analyzed.

Phase 2 pilot trial of tislelizumab plus low-dose nab-paclitaxel for extensive very high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

Purpose: Combinations of immune checkpoint inhibitors and nab-paclitaxel have improved outcomes in advanced urothelial carcinoma and muscle-invasive bladder cancer. This study evaluates the safety and efficacy of tislelizumab combined with low-dose nab-paclitaxel in extensive very high-risk (VHR) non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC).

Patients And Methods: TRUCE-02 was a single-arm phase 2 trial that included 63 patients with visually incomplete resection and/or high-volume high-grade T1 tumors (with or without carcinoma in situ), who were ineligible for or declined radical cystectomy.

The benefits of contrast-enhanced ultrasound in the differential diagnosis of suspicious breast lesions.

Background: Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) shows potential for the differential diagnosis of breast lesions in general, but its effectiveness remains unclear for the differential diagnosis of lesions highly suspicious for breast cancers.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic value of CEUS in differentiating pathological subtypes of suspicious breast lesions defined as category 4 of US-BI-RADS.

Methods: The dataset of 150 breast lesions was prospectively collected from 150 patients who underwent routine ultrasound and CEUS examination and were highly suspected of having breast cancers.