Study: 94% of Patients with Cancer Respond well to COVID-19 Vaccines

According to a new study, nearly all patients with cancer developed a good immune response to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines three to four weeks after receiving their second dose.
However, the fact that a small group of the patients exhibited no response raised questions about how their protection against the virus will be addressed moving forward. The findings of the study were published in the journal 'Cancer Cell'.
Among the 131 patients studied, 94 per cent developed antibodies to the coronavirus. Seven high-risk patients did not.
"We could not find any antibodies against the virus in those patients," said Dimpy P. Shah, MD, PhD, of the Mays Cancer Center, home to UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson. "That has implications for the future. Should we provide a third dose of vaccine after cancer therapy has completed in certain high-risk patients?"
Dr Shah is the corresponding author of the study. Coauthors are from the Mays Cancer Center and the University of Geneva.
"With other vaccines and infections, patients with cancer have been shown not to develop as robust an immune response as the general population," said study senior coauthor Ruben Mesa, MD, FACP, executive director of the Mays Cancer Center. "It made sense, therefore, to hypothesize that certain high-risk groups of patients do not have antibody response to COVID-19 vaccine."
"Patients with hematological malignancies, such as myeloma and Hodgkin lymphoma, were less likely to respond to vaccination than those with solid tumors," said Pankil K. Shah, MD, PhD, of the Mays Cancer Center, who served as co-lead author of the study with Alfredo Addeo, MD, senior oncologist at the Geneva University Hospital.
Among the high-risk groups, patients receiving a therapy called Rituximab within...