Surrozen Inks Strategic Partnership With Boehringer Ingelheim For Retinal Disease Candidate

 

• Surrozen Inc 
  SRZN-2.48%+ Free Alerts
   entered into a collaboration and license agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim to research and develop SZN-413 for retinal diseases.
• SZN-413 is a bi-specific antibody targeting Fzd4-mediated Wnt signaling designed using Surrozen's SWAP technology. 
• It is currently being developed for the treatment of retinal vascular-associated diseases. 
• In preclinical models of retinopathy, SZN-413 could potently stimulate Wnt signaling in the eye, induce normal retinal vessel regrowth, suppress pathological vessel growth, and reduce vascular leakage.
• Under the terms of the agreement, Boehringer Ingelheim will receive an exclusive, worldwide license to develop SZN-413 and other Fzd4-specific Wnt-modulating molecules for all purposes, including as a treatment for retinal diseases, for an upfront of $12.5 million. 
• Surrozen will also be eligible to receive up to $586.5 million in milestone payments.
• After an initial joint research period, Boehringer Ingelheim will assume all development and commercial responsibilities.

https://www.benzinga.com/general/biotech/22/10/29170386/surrozen-inks-strategic-partnership-with-boehringer-ingelheim-for-retinal-disease-candidate

For the Economy, Those Sick Days Are Still Adding Up

 A lot of Americans think they are through with Covid-19. But Covid isn’t yet through with them.

It is something that, as more and more people engage in activities that seem “normal,” like going into the office a few days a week, can be hard to bear in mind. But when thinking about the U.S. economy—particularly the job market—bearing it in mind is necessary.

How prevalent Covid is right now is hard to ascertain. The number of daily reported cases has been falling since July, suggesting that the wave caused by the highly transmissible BA.5 subvariant has crested. But with so many people using at-home tests, or merely staying home when they are symptomatic, lab-identified Covid case counts aren’t a great indicator of how many people are infected. For example, Boston-area wastewater data show a jump in virus concentrations over the past month, but its case count has been basically flat.

Newly released figures from the Census Bureau, based on surveys conducted over a 13-day span in the middle of last month, show that an estimated two million people were out of work because they were either sick with Covid or caring for someone who was, which compares with 2.5 million in a survey conducted in late July and early August, but is still a lot of people. Care should be taken when it comes to these figures, too, but it is probably safe to say that Covid is still playing havoc with the workforce. That probably matches with the experience of most people working at a business of any size: It seems like there is always somebody out with Covid.

For the job market, that matters. Even with the Labor Department reporting this week that there was a drop in job openings last month, there are still a ton of vacancies that employers are trying to fill. Sick job seekers, and sick human-resources officers, makes hiring harder. It also matters for workplace productivity—having a rotating cast of employees out sick makes it harder to get things done. Employers might have to hire extra workers to account for the fact that some will be out sick at any given time. Long Covid’s toll on workers, as well as the many people who are unwilling to work for fear of becoming sick, pose additional problems.

All of this makes it difficult to judge how tight the job market really is right now relative to history, for investors and, crucially, for policy makers such as the members of the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee. Our inability to forecast what will happen with the virus next makes things even worse. Will there be a winter wave? More highly transmissible subvariants that are able to evade the immune response from prior infection or vaccination? When will Covid-19 become endemic, circulating among the population more predictably?

There is also a question of what endemic—a description that spans diseases from the common cold to malaria—will look like. Not knowing the answer to that also means not knowing what kinds of constraints Covid will put on the labor market. While it is reasonable to hope that Covid’s drag on the labor market will lessen over time, it might never entirely go away.

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual Covid shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to Covid could be challenging.

https://finnoexpert.com/2022/10/06/for-the-economy-those-sick-days-are-still-adding-up/

Illegal Immigrants Arrested For Looting After Hurricane Ian As Florida Sheriff Issues New Warning

 by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Authorities in Lee County, Florida, confirmed Tuesday that three people who were arrested for looting were illegal immigrants.

A composite image shows four suspects accused of looting after Hurricane Ian, and file photo of Hurricane Ian's aftermath is seen in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., on Oct. 1, 2022. (Lee County Sheriff's Office; Marco Bello/Reuters)

Lee County jail records show that Brandon Mauricio Araya, 20; Stephen Eduardo Sanchez Araya, 20; Valerie Celeste Salcedo Mena, 26; and Omar Mejia Ortiz, 33, were arrested for burglary of an unoccupied structure during a state of emergency. Ortiz also faces petit larceny charges.

“As far as looting—we have law and order in Lee County. We have law and order in our great state of Florida, and we always will,” said Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno in a Tuesday news conference. “Right now, we have four cases of looting, and I’m proud to say they’re behind bars where they belong. Our residents are going to be safe.”

Marceno said that three of those individuals were illegally inside the United States while they were caught looting in Lee County, which was hammered by Category 4 Hurricane Ian last week. It’s not clear what location the suspects had targeted for looting.

“Three of these subjects are here illegally in this country—Robert Mena, Brandon Araya, Stephen Araya—all arrested for stealing bottles on Fort Myers Beach during the hurricane,” Marceno remarked, according to Fox News. “They were located and arrested. And I’m going to tell I’m not tolerating it again.”

The sheriff then issued a stark warning to would-be looters.

“I’m not playing. We’re not playing. We have law and order and great residents will be safe and secure. We’ve had arrests on these incidents,” he said. “You might walk in. You’ll be carried out.”

‘We’re a Second Amendment State’

Other Florida officials, including Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, have issued warnings about stealing from empty homes and businesses after the storm. DeSantis noted that some Florida residents have firearms.

“You never know what may be lurking behind somebody’s home,” the governor said last week. “And I would not want to chance that if I were you—given that we’re a Second Amendment state.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (C) delivers an update on Hurricane Ian, in Fort Myers, Fla., on Oct. 1, 2022. (Florida Governor’s Office via Reuters/Screenshot via NTD)

Some residents also “boarded up all the businesses, and there are people that wrote on their plywood, ‘you loot, we shoot,’” DeSantis added. “At the end of the day, we are not going to allow lawlessness to take advantage of this situation.”

More Damage

It comes as the number of storm-related deaths has risen in recent days because of the dangers posed by cleaning up and as search and rescue crews comb through some of the hardest-hit areas of Florida. Officials said that as of Monday, more than 2,350 people had been rescued throughout the state.

At least 79 people have been confirmed dead from the storm: 71 in Florida, five in North Carolina and three in Cuba since Ian made landfall on the Caribbean island on Sept. 27, a day before it reached Florida. After churning northeastward through the Sunshine State and moving out into the Atlantic, the hurricane made another landfall in South Carolina before pushing into the mid-Atlantic states.

In hardest-hit Lee County, Florida, all 45 people killed by the hurricane were over age 50.

The Epoch Times has contacted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, for comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/illegal-immigrants-arrested-looting-after-hurricane-ian-florida-sheriff-issues-new

Accepting Obesity Shouldn't Stop Us From Warning of Its Dangers

 Hi, I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University Grossman School of Medicine.

I'm going to enter into a topic that is really fraught with emotions, strong feelings, and worries, which is the topic of obesity. I decided to talk to you about this because I was watching the Emmy Awards on TV and I noticed two things.

One, the singer Lizzo came on — for those of you who don't know, she's an African American woman who's overweight — and she said, "What I want to see on the Emmys is people who are fat like me and Black like me." She performs with a group called The Big Girls, and they won an Emmy at the 74th Awards for their talent. She's a great singer, but heavy to the point where it's clear that there is obesity.

I think everybody knows that the price of obesity in America is huge — but sometimes we forget — due to diabetes, knee replacements, cancer, and many other diseases that follow in the wake of obesity. The cost estimate for the US due to overweight/obesity is $2 trillion per year added to our bill because of preventable disease due to overweight. People who are way overweight are costing much more in terms of their medical costs than are people who are not.

There's been much attention to this subject, too. Recently, the WHO came out and one of their leaders said that you have to listen to people with obesity and their families, but we have to treat obesity as a disease. It clearly is a chronic disease. It takes a terrible toll on people throughout their lifespan. We have to find ways to try and address it. We can't just pretend that it isn't the source of disability, death, and huge medical costs for individuals out there who are obese.

What's the controversy? It's how do we get into this subject and how do you address it with someone who's overweight? It's pretty clear that just shaming people and saying, "You should be ashamed of yourself, you're too fat," isn't necessarily going to be the road to getting people to lose weight.

There are many other people, like Lizzo, who say, "Look, I need some acceptance. I don't want to just be seen as someone who's got a chronic medical disease. I can sing, I can dance, and I'm talented. I don't want people to reject me." Lord only knows that Hollywood and the media have spent plenty of time fat shaming individuals when they gain weight or are overweight or obese.

This is one of the toughest topics I can think of, trying to walk the fine line between saying we accept difference — we accept cultural difference and what's viewed as beauty in size and shape. It's not one-size-fits-everybody. We also want to not be blaming, finger pointing, and condemning as a strategy to deal with obesity.

But we, on the other hand, can't just say that obesity is normal and something that is an individual lifestyle choice because it's going to harm you. Medicine, in particular, has to speak up and say that there are going to be consequences if you are morbidly obese or very heavy with high risk. You're going to wind up with many medical problems. Society has an interest in not having that happen because of the huge costs associated with those medical problems.

I think everybody needs to be thinking hard when they have patients and when they're talking to groups about raising the fact that obesity is a healthcare problem — it is a disease — but there are many people with diseases that we don't just see as diseases.

They are people who have other skills. They have other things they're doing in life. We can recognize that, praise that, and admire that. Shaming is not the route. I don't think there's any evidence that that does much good in trying to get people to change lifestyle or accept a treatment plan or surgery for obesity.

It's important to figure out a way to get into the topic, saying, "I discuss this with all my patients. Weight is part of a good, healthy lifestyle just like wearing a seatbelt, getting your vaccinations, and doing other things that are health-promoting." Be gentle and sympathetic while discussing the topic.

One of the things I get asked sometimes is, "Aren't there many physicians who are overweight?" I'm struggling with weight myself, and I think the way to broach that topic is to say I know about it, and we're in it together. I've seen it in my family or in my personal life. It's tough. It's hard. Over time, we want to do something about it. We don't just want to have negative health consequences.

At the same time, it doesn't mean that's the only thing that one focuses on about a person who's heavy any more than it's the only thing that one focuses on for someone who is in a wheelchair or who has a child. There are many traits, abilities, capacities, and skills that everyone has.

Lizzo, in a sense, is right. Why shouldn't she see people who look like her up on stage winning major awards? At the same time, everybody needs to understand that obesity is something that we have to get a grip on. Childhood obesity is exploding around the world, especially in the US. Adult obesity continues to take a terrible toll on disability and death.

We have to admit that it's not something that we want to ignore but it's not something that we want to make the be-all and end-all of anybody's life.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/980883

Ultra-Processed Food Intake by Moms Linked With Childhood Obesity

A mother's consumption of ultra-processed foods appears to be related to an increased risk of overweight or obesity in her children, according to new research.

Among the 19,958 mother–child pairs studied, 12.4% of children developed obesity or overweight in the full analytic study group, and the offspring of those mothers who ate the most ultra-processed foods had a 26% higher risk of obesity/overweight (12.1 servings/day) compared with those with the lowest consumption (3.4 servings/day), report Andrew T. Chan, MD, MPH, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues.

This study demonstrates the possible advantages of restricting ultra-processed food consumption among women and mothers who are in their reproductive years to potentially lower the risk of childhood obesity, the investigators note.

"These data support the importance of refining dietary recommendations and the development of programs to improve nutrition for women of reproductive age to promote offspring health," they write in their article published in BMJ.

"As a medical and public health community, we have to understand that the period of time in which a woman is carrying a child or during the time when she is raising her children represents a unique opportunity to potentially intervene to affect both the health of the mother and also the health of the children," Chan told Medscape Medical News in an interview.

It is important to address these trends both on an individual clinician level and on a societal level, noted Chan.

"This is a good opportunity to counsel patients about the potential linkage between their consumption of ultra-processed food for not just themselves but also their kids, and I think that added counseling and awareness may motivate individuals to think about their diets in a more favorable way," he added.

But ultra-processed foods are affordable and convenient, and many communities are not able to easily access fresh and healthy foods, so "it is incumbent upon [clinicians] to make it a priority and to break down those social and economic barriers, which make it difficult to have healthy and less processed food," Chan elaborated.

Modern Western diets frequently include ultra-processed foods — such as packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, and sugary cereals — which are linked to adult weight increase. The relationship between parental consumption of highly processed meals and offspring weight is, however, unclear across generations, the researchers note.

Hence, they set out to determine whether eating ultra-processed foods during peri-pregnancy and while raising children increased the risk of being overweight or having obesity among children and teens.

The study team assessed 14,553 mothers and their 19,958 children from the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS I and II) and Nurses' Health Study II (NHS II) in the United States. Males accounted for 45% of the children in the study, and the children's ages ranged from 7 to 17 years.

The NHS II is a continuing investigation following the lifestyle and health choices of over 100,000 female registered nurses in the United States in 1989, while the GUTS I involved about 17,000 children of the nurses in the NHS II. Participants in GUTS I filled out an initial lifestyle and health survey and were evaluated annually between 1997 and 2001, and every 2 years thereafter.  

Roughly 11,000 children from the NHS II were included in the GUTS II. The children were further evaluated in 2006, 2008, and 2011, as well as every 2 years thereafter.

Participants were followed until the children reached 18 years of age or experienced obesity and overweight onset. A subcohort consisted of 2925 mother–child pairs with data on peri-pregnancy eating patterns.

Maternal intake of ultra-processed foods while raising children was linked with obesity or overweight in children. Moreover, compared with the lowest consumption cohort (3.4 servings/day), there was a 26% greater risk for the greatest maternal ultra-processed food intake cohort (12.1 servings/day), after adjusting for child's sedentary time, ultra-processed food intake, physical activity, and established maternal risk factors.

Even though rates were elevated, ultra-processed food intake during pregnancy was not significantly linked to a higher risk of obesity or overweight in children (P _{for trend} = .07).

Sex, birth weight, age, gestational age, or maternal body weight had no effect on these correlations either.

The study's limitations include the fact that some of the children in the pairs were lost during follow-up, there may have been data misreporting, as the weight and diet measures were provided via self-reported questionnaires, and potential residual confounding given the observational study design, the researchers note.

Other limitations include that the mothers involved in the study came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, had similar personal and familial educational statuses, and were primarily White, which limits the generalizability of these data to other ethnic groups, the authors add.

"Further studies are warranted to investigate specific biological mechanisms and socioeconomic determinants underlying the observed associations between maternal ultra-processed food intake and offspring overweight and obesity," the researchers conclude.

BMJ 2022;379:e071767. Full text

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/981947

Amenorrhea Is Common After Chemotherapy for Breast Cancer

  More than half of women treated with chemotherapy for localized breast cancer reported persistent amenorrhea at year-4 (Y4) after diagnosis. This result comes from a French study that analyzed follow-up data of patients who were premenopausal at the time of diagnosis. The results, presented at the ESMO Congress 2022, also show that chemotherapy-related amenorrhea (CRA) has a substantial impact on women's quality of life.

"This study, which looked at post-diagnosis data, opens the door to new ways of guiding the clinical examination," pointed out Rayan Kabirian, MD, an oncologist at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, France, and the main author of the study. In his opinion, the findings should encourage further research into chemotherapy's side effects in women with amenorrhea so that, when needed, these patients can be given supportive care adapted to their specific situation.

High Prevalence

Chemotherapy given before or after breast cancer surgery may induce amenorrhea. This absence of menses for 6 or more months can be temporary or permanent. As Kabirian noted in his presentation, some studies have already shown that the risk of developing amenorrhea is correlated with age, type of chemotherapy, and the duration of treatment. There is not enough data to characterize this side effect, however.

For their study, he and his team used CANTO (CANcer TOxicities), a multicenter, prospective cohort of stage I–III breast cancer. A total of 12,000 women at 26 cancer centers in France were enrolled in the cohort. They were followed for 5 years after being treated for localized breast cancer. The aim? To evaluate the long-term impact of treatment-related toxicities on quality of life.

The researchers worked with data pertaining specifically to premenopausal patients with breast cancer, aged 50 years or younger at diagnosis, who were treated with chemotherapy. The main analysis included 1676 women with a mean age at diagnosis of 42.2 years; 31% were under age 40. A total of 745 women were followed up at Y4 after diagnosis.

Single-Agent Chemotherapy

Anthracycline and taxane-based combination chemotherapy were given to 91% of the patients either before or after surgery. The others were given one of the two agents. In addition, 75% received hormone therapy and 25% received trastuzumab (Herceptin), a targeted therapy administered to treat HER2-positive breast cancers.

The results showed that 83.1% reported CRA at year-1 (Y1) after diagnosis. Among 745 women with follow-up at 4 years or later, 58% had persistent CRA. And some women's menses resumed — in most cases between the first and second year after diagnosis.

The findings of this study were in line with those of previous studies: older age at diagnosis, receipt of hormone therapy, anthracycline and taxane-based combination chemotherapy, and a lower BMI were associated with higher rates of CRA. Conversely, treatments with trastuzumab alone and with anthracycline alone were associated with a lower risk of developing amenorrhea.

Impaired Attention

An analysis focusing on age groups showed that younger women were the ones more likely to have a resumption of menses. Indeed, this was true at the end of Y1 after diagnosis for 45% of patients aged 18-34 years and only 7% of patients over 40 years. In terms of persistent CRA at Y4, the numbers were 26% and 78%, respectively.

"We observed that for women under age 34, there was a 50% chance that their menses would resume, even after having amenorrhea for 2 years. And for those between 35 and 40, there was a 30% chance that their menses would resume, even after having amenorrhea for 2 years," Kabirian stated.

The final finding was that, for most women in the study, persistent CRA was associated with deterioration of quality of life. In addition to having a greater risk of experiencing impairment of attention and concentration and worse sexual function, women whose menses did not resume at Y4 had more long-term, chemotherapy-related side effects (such as dry mouth, dysgeusia, hot flashes, headaches, and alopecia).

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/981949