Trending News Today: Combo Treatment Benefits Patients with Kidney Cancer in Late-Stage Trial

A combination treatment of Merck’s Keytruda and Pfizer’s Inlyta met the main goals of a late-stage study in patients with kidney cancer, Reuters reported. According to the article, the combination resulted in statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in overall survival and disease progression compared with Pfizer’s kidney cancer drug Sutent. Keytruda is already approved for a range of other cancers, including lung cancer, and Inlyta is already approved to treat advanced renal cell cancer in patients who failed 1 prior systemic therapy.

A new study showed that HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drastically reduced new infections in a large group of high-risk men who have sex with men in Australia, Reuters reported. According to the article, 3645 of the men in the study received PrEP and were required to be tested for HIV at 1 month and 3 months after starting the drug regimen, then every 3 months thereafter. The researchers found that new diagnoses in men who have sex with men across 1 Australian state dropped by nearly a third, from 295 cases in the year prior to the study to 221 cases in the year after the drug was widely distributed, the article reported.

A recent study found that the number of hours spent with poorly controlled blood sugar and the variation of glucose levels over 24 hours can influence the risk of developing diabetic retinopathy, Reuters reported. According to the article, the researchers asked 3262 patients to wear continuous glucose monitors over 3 days to directly measure their blood sugar in real time. The researchers found that that 24% of individuals in the study had diabetic retinopathy and patients with the least amount of time in range in a typical 24-hour period were more likely to have eye damage, the article reported.