Results of a mid-stage trial reported that twice as many patients with advanced pancreatic cancer treated with an experimental drug being developed by Actuate Therapeutics survived one year of treatment with chemotherapy compared to those treated with chemo alone.
Researchers reported in Nature Medicine that at one year, 44% of patients treated with Actuate’s elraglusib were surviving versus 22% of those who had chemotherapy alone.
The 233-patient trial in North America and Europe had a drug group survival rate of approximately 13% at two years. None of those who were given the normal chemotherapy survived as long.
The drug decreased the risk of death within the study by 38 percent, with those who received elraglusib living 10.1 median years as compared to 7.2 years when chemotherapy was only administered.
These findings will give hope to the patients with pancreatic cancer, but the study leaders, Dr. Devalingam Mahalingam of Northwestern University in Illinois, expressed optimism with pessimism in a statement. Elraglusib acts by blocking a protein known as GSK-3 beta that induces cancer cell survival, tumor growth, and immune evasion.
Though these findings will require Phase 3 trials to be validated, it is positive to see a survival benefit in such a hard-to-treat cancer, Mahalingam said. With a new mechanism of action of this drug, these findings suggest that it may have a wider usage in other types of tumors.
Although artificial intelligence applications in medical records that create clinical notes are altering the current way doctors record the time they spent with a patient, the task remains more effectively done by humans, scientists concluded in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians.
Ambient AI scribers operate silently and work in the background, listening to doctor-patient discussions and summarising the experience in clinical notes. The most important thing is to reduce paperwork and provide doctors with more time to pay attention to patients.
Practically, the technology has proved to be promising. The researchers observed that AI scribes are able to decrease the time spent on documentation, after-hours work, and even allow doctors to feel more engaged during appointments, which in turn can reduce the amount of time spent on documentation.
However, the research published in Annals of Internal Medicine discovered benefits of humans over AI, particularly in aspects such as completeness, systematic, and clinical utility. The researchers provided 11 different AI scribe systems and 18 human doctors with recordings of five simulated clinical visits with background noise, masked speakers, and non-native accents, and asked them to produce patient notes.
The results were judged by 30 reviewers without their knowledge of the authors. On the board, human-written notes prevailed, and marked variation in cases related to back pain, chest pain, and heart failure, the researchers discovered.
The researchers also found that it was more difficult to achieve this when the AI systems were tested in challenging conditions like noisy environments or muffled speech.
The authors stated that AI scribes need to be viewed as draft documentation generators that need to be reviewed and edited, and not as a replacement for the clinician-written documentation.
A study at the American Association of Cancer Research meeting in San Diego has found exposure to wildfire smoke to be significantly linked with increased risks of multiple kinds of cancer.
The data on the incidence of cancer was collected by researchers through the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial, which monitors new cancer diagnoses in adults in the United States who have never had any history of malignancies.
The researchers measured the exposure to wildfire smoke by evaluating the fine particulate matter and black carbon in the air based on ground-level air pollution data of participants’ neighborhoods and satellite images that assisted in determining the days their areas of residence were exposed to the smoke.
Compared to 91,460 respondents with data collected between 2006 and 2018, the exposure to wildfire smoke increased the risk of developing colorectal, breast cancer, and bladder cancer as well as blood cancer, but not ovarian cancer and melanoma. The researchers also found that the risk of developing these cancers was higher with the extent of air pollution caused by the fires.
To the general audience, the most important thing is that the smoke of wildfires is not a temporary respiratory or cardiovascular issue. It can also be a long-term cancer risk, according to the study leader, Qizhen Wu of The University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center, in a statement.
It is important to note that even at relatively low levels of wildfire smoke (particulate matter) that people are often exposed to, there is an increased risk of cancer.
Wu also pointed out that the information about the source and contents of the wildfire smoke will be different among various geographic populations, and the chemical reactions and compounds that undergo change in smoke as it travels can also affect health.
How Actuate Drug Works
The Actuate therapy targets GSK-3 beta, a protein linked to tumor growth and immune resistance. By inhibiting this pathway, Actuate aims to make tumors more responsive to chemotherapy and improve immune system access, enhancing overall treatment effectiveness.
Impact on Actuate Oncology Strategy
These results reinforce Actuate’s focus on developing therapies for hard-to-treat cancers. Pancreatic cancer has historically had very low survival rates, making the progress achieved by Actuate particularly significant for both patients and clinicians.
Industry Significance of Actuate Findings
The success of the trial highlights a broader shift toward combination therapies in oncology. Actuate’s approach demonstrates how integrating targeted drugs with standard treatments can yield meaningful improvements in outcomes, especially in aggressive cancers.
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