President of MiraVista Diagnostics. D.C.V. receives clinical trial funding from CSL Behring Canada, Shire Canada, and Cidara and an honorarium from Novartis Canada. The rest of the authors declare that they have no relevant conflicts of interest.

Smoking was consistently associated with increase in oropharyngeal cancer risk in models stratified by HPV16 seropositivity. In addition, we report that the prevalence of oropharyngeal cancer increases with smoking for both HPV16-positive and HPV16-negative persons. The impact of smoking on HPV16-positive oropharyngeal cancer highlights the continued need for smoking cessation programmes for primary prevention of head and neck cancer.

No abstract

Allergen-specific immunotherapy (AIT) is the only allergy treatment that confers long-term symptom amelioration for patients suffering from allergy. The most frequently used allergen application route is subcutaneous injection (SCIT), commonly taken as the gold standard, followed by sublingual (SLIT) or oral (OIT) application of allergen preparations. This is an up-to-date review of the clinical evidence for a novel route of allergen application, i.e., directly into lymph nodes – intralymphatic immunotherapy (ILIT). The major advantages of ILIT over the current AIT approaches are its short duration and the low allergen doses administered. The whole treatment consists of merely 3 ultrasound-guided injections into inguinal lymph nodes 1 month apart. While the number of patients included in randomised controlled trials is still limited, the clinical results for ILIT are encouraging, but more clinical trials are needed, as well as more preclinical work for optimising formulations.

Background: α1-antitrypsin (AAT) serves primarily as an inhibitor of the elastin degrading proteases, neutrophil elastase and proteinase 3. There is ample clinical evidence that inherited severe AAT deficiency predisposes to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Augmentation therapy for AAT deficiency has been available for many years, but to date no sufficient data exist to demonstrate its efficacy. There is increasing evidence that AAT is able to exert effects other than protease inhibition. We investigated whether Prolastin, a preparation of purified pooled human AAT used for augmentation therapy, exhibits antibacterial effects.

Our results provide evidence that deficiency of AAT may be associated with an increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Our findings point to the importance of selecting a correct biological fluid when analyzing specific biomarkers, and also show that of 4 measured biomarkers, only the BAL IL-8 was higher in COPD patients when compared to asthma.

Background: Allergen specific IgG4 levels have been monitored as a surrogate marker for the tolerance inducing effect of subcutaneous immunotherapy (SCIT) in many studies. Its accuracy at group level has been well established, but IgG4 has not yet found its place in the daily care of immunotherapy patients. Methods: Intralymphatic immunotherapy (ILIT) is a novel route for allergy vaccination against pollen allergy, where an ultrasound-guided injection of 1000 SQ-U Alutard is given directly into a groin lymph node. The suggested standard dosing so far has been one injection with 4 weeks in-between. In total 3000 SQ-U with the treatment completed in 2 months. IgG4 was measured with Immulite technique and rhinoconjunctivitis symptoms were estimated with daily online questionnaires. Mann-Whitney U-test and Wilcoxon Signed Rank test were applied for comparisons between groups and within groups, respectively. Results: The present study demonstrates that a single, preseason ILIT booster of 1000 SQ-U Alutard 5-grasses ® , re-increases the allergen specific timothy-IgG4 levels, in patients already treated with ILIT before the previous pollen season. It also shows the feasibility of the ILIT-route for allergy vaccination of rhinitis patients, with or without concomitant asthma, with low degree of side effects and reconfirms high and sustained patient satisfaction. Conclusions: It is tempting to suggest that the allergen specific IgG4 levels can be used to build an intuitive algorithm for future clinical guidance of ILIT patients.