KENDALL, Fla. – A global summit in South Florida is bringing in leaders from the nation’s leading cancer centers.
Summit founder Dr. Guenther Koehne, who is the deputy director of the Miami Cancer Institute, part of Baptist Health South Florida, said the two- day event will focus on the most recent advances in the treatment of malignant blood cancers through new emerging therapies.
“Now we have, instead of targeting all cells with chemotherapy specifically, the ability to target the tumor cells,” he said. “So we have approaches to target leukemia cells with monoclonal antibodies, with T-cells. With other immuno-effector cells, we can target multiple myeloma cells, and with this the side effect profile has significantly improved and now we have questions during this summit (about) how to best combine these treatments, (and) how to reduce even more side effects by reducing the chemotherapy profile and adding in the immunotherapies.”
The summit runs from Friday, March 10, through Saturday, March 11, at the Ritz Carlton in Coconut Grove.
Also in today’s health news, new research suggests people are less likely to develop “long COVID” after getting sick with the omicron variant.
The study out of Switzerland looked at 1,200 health care workers in that country.
Researchers compared those workers’ self-reported long COVID symptoms during the original strain in 2020 and 2021, and again during the omicron strain’s peak in mid-2022.
According to the lead researcher, people who got the original strain were up to 67 percent more likely to report lingering symptoms.
The research is set to be presented next month at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.