Diagnosis and treatment of hairy cell leukemia as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

Hairy cell leukemia (HCL) is an indolent B-cell malignancy, usually driven by the BRAF V600E mutation. For 30 years, untreated and relapsed HCL was successfully treated with purine analogs, but minimal residual disease (MRD) remained in most patients, eventually causing relapse. Repeated purine analogs achieve decreasing efficacy and increasing toxicity, particularly to normal T-cells. MRD-free complete remissions (CRs) are more common using rituximab with purine analogs in both 1st-line and relapsed settings. BRAF inhibitors and Ibrutinib can achieve remission, but due to persistence of MRD, must be used chronically to prevent relapse. BRAF inhibition combined with Rituximab can achieve high MRD-free CR rates. Anti-CD22 recombinant immunotoxin moxetumomab pasudotox is FDA-approved in the relapsed setting and is unique in achieving high MRD-free CR rates as a single-agent. Avoiding chemotherapy and rituximab may be important in ensuring both recovery from COVID-19 and successful COVID-19 vaccination, an area of continued investigation.

Small molecular fluorescence dyes for immuno cell analysis.

Many diseases, including cancers, AIDS, diabetes, asthma, Parkinson's, and lymphoma, are associated with the immune cell responses of patients suffering from them. Identifying the underlying immune response in such diseases is critical to correctly diagnose their root cause and determine the correct medications to target that root cause for personal therapy and immunotherapy. This work focuses on small molecular CF dyes to conjugate with antibodies, such as CD4 and CD19, for their application in flow cytometry. The CF dyes enable the expansion of flow cytometry reagent panels to support high dimensional flow cytometry analysis of the resulting emissions of 30-40 fluorescent colors, a record in flow cytometry. The CF dyes can be used along with existing flow cytometry dyes to provide a quick, accurate, and cost-effective method for the diagnosis and immunology treatment of diseases such as minimal residual disease (MRD) after cancer therapy. The CF dyes will also be an effective tool for the clinical studies of immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and the related vaccine development.