In the past few years several cases of pure red-cell aplasia (PRCA) associated with neutralizing antierythropoietin antibodies emerging during epoetin treatment have been reported [1–6]. The majority of the cases have occurred in Europe and have been associated with subcutaneous administration of epoetin alfa [4,7,9,10]. There are very few reports from theUSA. The epoetin alfa preparations used...

I their meta-analysis of the efficacy of peginterferon alfa-2a (PEG-IFN-α2a) or alfa2b (PEG-IFN-α2b) and ribavirin for the treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV), Alavian et al. (1), analyzing pooled data from 7 studies, conclude that PEG-IFNα2a (with similar safety) is more effective than PEGIFN-α2b. While PEG-IFN alfa-2b with ribavirin is generally considered as the treatment of choice for chro...

Anemia is frequent in cancer patients with chemotherapy, and has an important negative effect on health-related quality of life (QoL). Darbepoetin alfa belongs to a new class of erythropoietic proteins with a unique molecular structure and interesting properties compared with classic recombinant human erythropoietin. Darbepoetin alfa is effective for chemotherapy-induced anemia when administere...

Outcome measures to assess therapeutic interventions in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients with mild lung disease are lacking. Our aim was to determine if the lung clearance index (LCI) can detect a treatment response to dornase alfa in paediatric CF patients with normal spirometry. CF patients between 6-18 yrs of age with FEV(1 )≥ 80% pred were eligible. In a crossover design, 17 patients received ...

Anemia is common in patients with cancer or myelodysplastic syndrome. Erythropoietic therapy offers an effective way to manage anemia by increasing hemoglobin levels, decreasing transfusion requirements, and alleviating symptoms. We reviewed data showing the feasibility and effectiveness of treatment with the erythropoiesis-stimulating protein darbepoetin alfa at extended dosing intervals to tr...

OBJECTIVE This study evaluated the use of Corifollitropin alfa in patients with previous poor response to recombinant follicle stimulating hormone in long-term protocols using gonadotropin-releasing hormone. METHODS Twenty-seven poor responders to previous treatment with the long term protocol using the recombinant follicle stimulating hormone (Group 1) were selected and then submitted to a s...

Recombinant interferon-alfa (Intron A, Roferon-A) has been under investigation as a therapeutic agent for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) for 25 years. It has antitumor efficacy in a number of histologic subtypes but has not been accepted as a clinically useful agent by the majority of oncologists/hematologists. A total of 10 prospective, randomized trials of interferon-alfa have been conducted in...

Erythropoietin and its receptor function as primary mediators of the normal physiological response to hypoxia. Erythropoietin is recognized for its central role in erythropoiesis, but studies in which recombinant human erythropoietin (epoetin alfa) is injected directly into ischaemic rodent brain show that erythropoietin also mediates neuroprotection. Abundant expression of the erythropoietin r...

Indications Renal cell carcinoma In July 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval for use of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitor bevacizumab (Avastin) in combination with interferon alfa for treatment of patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Approval was based on results from the BO17705 trial, which demonstrated a 5-month improvement i...