8 February 2021 (Monday) - BTLP-TACT Excercise

Time for another BTLP-TACT exercise. The software immediately stuffed up by not presenting me with any cases at all. 

After a little fiddling about it presented me with a single case – a thirty-one year old woman on the maternity ward requiring four units of blood for the next day.
She grouped as O Rh(D) Positive with a negative antibody screen. I selected four units of O Rh(D) positive K-negative blood.

I got the red light. Apparently for one of the units I selected “The issued component does not meet specific.”
I wonder what that is supposed to mean?

 I’m losing heart with these BTLP-TACT exercises. The software is flaky at best.

5 February 2021 (Friday) - Lymphomas and Lymphoid Neoplasia:

The American Society of Hematology sent an update on lymphomas and lymphoid neoplasia today:

Avelumab Shows Clinical Activity in Relapsed/Refractory Extranodal Natural Killer/T-Cell Lymphoma Investigators also found that high PD-L1 expression correlated with achievement of complete response to avelumab in this patient population.

Guest Commentary: The Future of Chronic Graft-Versus-Host Disease Steven Pavletic, MD, and Kirk Schultz, MD, report on the progress and challenges in the management of chronic graft-versus-host disease – the subject of a recent National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference.

FDA Accepts Investigational New Drug Application for PBCAR19B in Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
The decision allows Precision BioSciences to initiate a phase I trial evaluating the safety and clinical activity of its CAR T-cell therapy in patients with relapsed or refractory NHL.

 

3 February 2021 (Wednesday) - IBMS Newsletter

The IBMS sent their newsletter today. You can see it by clicking here. I find it difficult to be fair to them, but the newsletter was interesting if not particularly relevant to me. CPD is supposed to help me improve what I do daily, and the IBMS is my professional body. If anyone should be providing directly targeted information it should be them.

• A refresher on setting up the microscope’s condenser maybe? 
  
• A gallery of more obscure morphological findings?
  
• Case studies on difficult antibody investigations?

Instead we have interesting science articles which we might show off to those who don’t know what we do in an attempt to impress them, three job adverts, calls for nominations for “Biomedical Scientist of the Year” (which rewards one and thereby offends thousands).

Mind you I was intrigued by their “Glowing CPD” campaign in which the Science Council is inviting IBMS members to share their stories of outstanding CPD from 2020 in a new campaign. Am I being cynical in thinking they will be more interested in s new form on which to record CPD rather than looking st what is written on that form?
There’s only one way to find out…