Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Q: The story doesn’t mention cost at all. Since Lucentis can cost $2,000 per injection, that’s a significant oversight. It would also be useful to tell readers how Lucentis injections compare with the cost of laser treatment. The benefits are, for the most part, reasonably well explained. But those explanations lack numbers to back them up and are overstated in at least one place. “One benefit discussed in the release is that study participants who received laser treatment were more likely to suffer peripheral vision loss than participants who were treated solely with Lucentis — although this isn’t quantified. A second benefit was that participants who received laser treatment were more likely to require subsequent surgery to remove blood from the eye — and this was quantified. But the release pushes things a bit when it comes to vision, or visual acuity. The release states: “At two years, vision in the Lucentis group improved by an average of about half a line on an eye chart, compared with virtually no change in the laser group.” But here’s how the journal article puts it: “There was no statistically significant visual acuity difference between the ranibizumab and PRP [laser] groups at 2 years. The language in the journal article itself stresses that what was being evaluated was whether Lucentis was at least as good as laser treatment — and they found that, after two years, the visual acuity of patients who took Lucentis (and had no laser treatment) was as good as patients who had the laser treatment. The release could have simply stated this and avoided confusion. In short, this was a close one — but the lack of numbers on peripheral vision and the overstatement of the visual acuity results make this a “Not Satisfactory.” The release mentions that one study volunteer in the Lucentis group developed an eye infection and stated that “serious systemic adverse events,” namely cardiac arrest and stroke, occurred at similar rates among the two groups undergoing the two different procedures. We’ll rate that satisfactory for the disclosure although the release might have gone even further by mentioning the other side effects named in the study including inflammation and elevated intraocular pressure which occurred in both treatment groups. The release does a good job of describing the study design, the number of participants, and the fact that this was a randomized clinical trial. A few words about the limitations of the study — e.g. the investigators and patients could not be masked to which treatment they were getting, would have be useful as well. No disease mongering here. The release does tell readers that the study was funded by the National Eye Institute. However, it does not make clear that Lloyd Paul Aiello — who is quoted in the release — was also a co-author of the journal article. The release also fails to mention that several co-authors receive research funding or consulting fees from Genentech, which developed ranibizumab and markets it in the U.S., and Novartis, which markets the drug outside the U.S. The release does a good job of comparing Lucentis to conventional laser treatment for PDR and we’ll award a Satisfactory rating on that basis. However, we’d note that these are not necessarily the only two options. Lucentis is classed as an “anti-VEGF” (anti- vascular endothelial growth factor) drug — by blocking a protein called VEGF, the drug can reverse abnormal blood vessel growth and decrease fluid in the retina. Other drugs in this category include Avastin and Eylea. Are those drugs under consideration for trials related to PDR treatment? If so, it’s worth mentioning — particularly since Avastin costs around $60 per dose, as compared to Lucentis’s $2,000 per dose. The release notes that Lucentis is already used to treat other diabetes-related eye problems, and “should be considered a viable treatment option for people with PDR.” The clinical trial at issue here appears to be the first to look at the use of Lucentis as a treatment for PDR, particularly in a randomized study with direct comparison to laser treatment. However, the release doesn’t tell readers that. On the other hand, the release does make clear that this is the first significant advance in clinical treatment for PDR since the 1970s — that’s good context. The release does a good job of avoiding hype and explaining what was a complex study.

A: Lucentis Proves Effective Against Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy
****
Q: The heath secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine, announced Thursday she’ll be adding them as of July 20. Levine says her decision was based on the recommendation of the state’s Medical Marijuana Advisory Board and her own review of medical research literature. She says medical marijuana shouldn’t be the first treatments for those conditions, but physicians can recommend it to be used together with traditional therapeutic approaches. The list already includes cancer, epilepsy, intractable seizures, post-traumatic stress disorder, terminal illness and other conditions. Nearly 111,000 Pennsylvanians have been certified for participation in the state’s medical marijuana program .

A: State adds anxiety to qualifying conditions for medical pot.
****
Q: True, the news hit hard last month that the so-called “Boston patients” - two men who received bone marrow transplants that appeared to rid them completely of the AIDS-causing virus - had relapsed and gone back onto antiretroviral treatment. But experts say the disappointment could lay the basis for important leaps forward in the search for a cure. “It’s a setback for the patients, of course, but an advance for the field because the field has now gained a lot more knowledge,” said Steven Deeks, a professor and HIV expert at the University of California, San Francisco. He and other experts say the primary practical message is that current tests designed to detect even very low levels of HIV present in the body are simply not sensitive enough. As well as having the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the Boston patients both also had a type of blood cancer called lymphoma, for which they were treated using bone marrow transplants - one man in 2008 and the other in 2010. They continued taking the antiretroviral AIDS drugs, but eight months after each patient’s transplant, doctors found they could not detect any sign of HIV in their blood. In the early part of 2013, both patients decided to stop taking their AIDS drugs and both appeared to remain HIV-free - prompting their doctors, Timothy Henrich and Daniel Kuritzkes from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to announce at a conference in July that they may have been cured. Yet in December came news that one of the men had begun to show signs of an HIV rebound by August, while the second patient had a relapse in November. Henrich said the virus’ comeback underlined how ingenious HIV can be in finding hiding places in the body to evade attack efforts by the immune system and by drug treatment. “Through this research we have discovered the HIV reservoir is deeper and more persistent than previously known and that our current standards of probing for HIV may not be sufficient,” he said, adding that both patients were “currently in good health” and back on antiretroviral therapy. Barely a decade ago, few HIV scientists would have dared put the words HIV and cure in the same sentence. Yet some intriguing and inspiring cases in recent years mean many now believe it is just a question of time before a cure is found. First was the now famous case of Timothy Ray Brown, the so-called “Berlin patient,” whose HIV was eradicated by a complex treatment for leukemia in 2007 involving the destruction of his immune system and a stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection. Such an elaborate, expensive and life-threatening procedure could never be used as a broad-spectrum approach for the world’s 34 million HIV patients. But the results in Brown focused scientific attention on a genetic mutation known as ‘CCR5 delta 32’ as a target for possible gene therapy treatment. Then last March, French scientists who followed 14 HIV-positive people known as the “Visconti patients”, who were treated very swiftly with HIV drugs but then stopped treatment, said that even after seven years off therapy, they were still showing no signs of the virus rebounding. That announcement came only weeks after news of the “functional cure” of an HIV-positive baby in Mississippi who received antiretroviral treatment for 18 months from the day she was born. By the time she was two this appeared to have stopped the virus replicating and spreading. A “functional cure” is when HIV is reduced to such low levels that it is kept at bay even without treatment, though the virus can still be detected in the body. Sharon Lewin, an HIV expert at Monash University in Australia, said all these developments, as well as the setback suffered by the Boston patients, inspired scientists to investigate many different approaches in the search for a cure. “We’ve learnt many things here - and one of the most important is that a tiny, tiny amount of virus can get the whole thing going again,” she told Reuters. “It’s a clear message that we need better ways to pick up the virus.”  Scientists are now more convinced than ever that a two-pronged approach which aims to firmly suppress the virus while bolstering the immune system provides the best way forward. “We need to attack in two ways - reduce the virus to very low levels and also to boost the immune response. We can’t do one without the other,” said Lewin. “So we still have to think of other creative ways to control HIV. And it’s still early days... before we can say which approach is likely to be the winner.”

A:
Relapse of 'cured' HIV patients spurs AIDS science on.
****