Top 10 Most “Interesting” Publications of 2024

Garth Sundem  00:00

Garth, welcome to this episode of the Medical Affairs Professional Society podcast series, Elevate. I’m your host, Garth Sundem, and today we’re looking at the top 10 most interesting publications of 2024 from the perspective of Medical Affairs. And we’ll link these papers from the podcast at medicalaffairs.org. So joining us are Mike Taylor, Head of Data Insights at Altmetric, Carrie Brubaker, Independent Consultant Medical Affairs and Communication Strategy with Carrie Brubaker Medical Affairs Consultancy, and Carlos Areia, Senior Data Scientist at Altmetric. This episode is sponsored by Altmetric. So guys, we’ve got 20 minutes. We have 10 papers. I think we can do math on that. But before we get to the papers, I was wondering, I mean, there’s so many out there. I mean, how many millions are hitting PubMed every day? Mike, what in the world makes a paper interesting these days.

Mike Taylor  01:02

This is what we’re here to discuss. Because in all the years I’ve been working with Medical Affairs, people I’m working with will say, what is good, I don’t know with has this been successful? And the answer is, it’s incredibly hard to know what’s successful. We’ve not yet really formulated that language to talk about impact or success. We all know what a good journal is, but what’s a good paper? This is a really important question, and we’ve come to this with, dare I say it, a heterogeneous approach to try and understand what makes a good paper in a specific area, specific discipline, and how do we talk about that success?

Garth Sundem  01:44

Okay, so a couple, couple, maybe criteria for picking a good or interesting paper, Carlos. What are those? How did we do this? How did we pick the 10 papers?

Carlos Areia  01:54

So in this case, this is like exploring different types of signals a bit outside the forum. We are going a bit beyond traditional metrics. So in this case, the criteria was quite fun and flexible, but there are two underlying rules. So it needed to be published this year, 2024, and it needed to be either affiliated or sponsored by industry. I might jump in. I’ll do the first, the first publication, and then I’ll Michael explain a bit more, because he loves this trial. But there are some underlying the only two rules that are consistent throughout this published this year and affiliated with industry somehow.

Garth Sundem  02:37

Okay, let’s see the paper. Cool. All right.

Carlos Areia  02:41

So first paper is the top paper on the highest sentiment amongst clinicians.

Mike Taylor  02:47

So what does that mean? Explain what that means.

Carlos Areia  02:50

What? What does that mean is that, using a sentiment analysis that we have inside the health metrics, we have classified posts that are from clinicians on particular trials. And the rule was we included all studies that had at least 100 clinician posts in this year and and then basically we order it by sentiment. So this trial is the one that had the highest sentiment amongst clinicians, and the trial is the lolatinib versus crizotinib in patients with advanced ALK positive non small cell lung cancer, the five year outcomes from the crown study phase three. And this is by Benjamin Solomon at all, and it was published in May on the Journal of Clinical Oncology. And I think I might hand over to Mike, because he has worked with his 12 for he loves this trial. Okay,

Mike Taylor  03:51

I really do you know I’m old enough to have known a few people who have died of lung cancer, and through most of my life, it’s been a death sentence with a with a with a very hard, difficult prognosis. This particular product, this molecule, or Latin, is used for ALK positive, non small cell lung cancer, and that is only about two or 3% of people who get lung cancer. But what it’s done is extraordinary. I mean, it is absolutely breathtakingly brilliant, because it has come from being a death sentence, being something which effectively people are living with. I just rejoice when I see things like that. And we can see clinicians rejoicing online. It is, you know, there are plenty of adverse effects. It is difficult to manage all of that, but it is just one of those breakthroughs that deserves to be celebrated, in my view.

Garth Sundem  04:44

So there’s a big paper. Clinicians love it that makes your study, that makes a good paper, and there is much rejoicing. Okay, where are we going for the next paper, out of JCO, out of clinician sentiment. You,

Carrie Brubaker  05:01

yeah. So the next publication that that we’re going to be sharing with you actually turns, turns to another healthcare professional audience and explores, let’s say, a top performing paper, a top sentiment paper among nurses. So the title of this paper was multimodal technology assisted intervention for the management of menopause after cancer improves cancer related quality of life. And these are the results from the menopause after cancer or Mac study. This publication was authored by Donahoe et al and published in the journal cancers in March of this year. So the study was a single arm, phase two trial that evaluated a group of interventions for managing vasomotor symptoms of women after treatment for cancer and particularly when conventional menopausal hormone therapy was not an option. These interventions included non hormonal pharmacotherapy, digital cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, self management strategies via a mobile app, support from an additional identified person with the aim of improving QOL outcomes. So indeed, participants showed notable increases in global quality of life scores, reduction in the frequency and bother of vasomotor symptoms, as well as improvements in their insomnia. When this study was published in spring of this year, it was selected by cancers as their journal title story. In our analysis of our of its performance, we identified that sentiment about this publication, as I said, was notably high among nurses. And perhaps this is not surprising, because the publication integrates elements of disease and patient care from another of a number of settings of clinical interest, including women’s health, oncology, digital health technology, modalities and quality of life assessments. So from my position, it was really valuable and interesting to be able to explore sentiment about a paper, not for just a traditional audience like physicians or clinicians, but also for nurses. And

Garth Sundem  07:16

that’s interesting. I just looked up so cancers plural journal has nowhere near the impact factor of cancer. Singular, the journal is this an instance of a study that is a big fish in a little pond and had the opportunity to lead the way in a journal, as opposed to being buried in a bigger journal.

Carrie Brubaker  07:42

It’s a really interesting question, and I know we’re going to be when we when we close our discussion today, we’re going to be addressing kind of this question of journal type, journal target, journal audience, and what the value here is from from my, from my position and from our position, is that there was a study that incorporated multiple interesting elements that resonate so highly for nursing audiences that it really stood out in this way, but also addresses elements that are relevant for a broad swath of patient populations. Okay,

Garth Sundem  08:22

cool. I got you women, oncology, etc. Okay, Onward, onward. Where are we going for number three,

Carlos Areia  08:29

Onward, onward. So the number three, Carrie will talk a bit about it as well, but the rule is very simple. It’s just the top Altmetric score. This paper. This paper is called blood biomarkers to detect Alzheimer disease in primary care and secondary care. Might be aware of it. It made quite a bit of noise from pump vist et al, and it was published in JAMA in July. This paper has an amazing score of 3596 out metric and an astonishing since July, meaning that it’s only been like three or four months, five more than 500 news stories and over 500 posts and reposts, etc, etc. So yeah, it created quite a bit of discussion around and I’ll pass it on to Carrie.

Carrie Brubaker  09:21

All right, thanks, Carlos. So as the authors state at the outset of this paper, and as we reiterate here, an accurate blood test for Alzheimer disease could streamline both the diagnostic workup and its treatment over time. So as Carlos mentioned, and it is alluded by the title this study evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of a blood test for Alzheimer’s in both primary and secondary care settings. And given its findings, it’s really not surprising that the publication resonated so strongly for both clinical and general audiences the way that it did in the. Mid summer and beyond. So in the study, a total of 1213 patients with cognitive symptoms were examined in the country of Sweden from February 2020 until January of 2024 and in this group of patients, specific cohorts were analyzed for multiple blood biomarkers related to Alzheimer’s pathology, the so called amyloid probability score two, or APS two, blood test demonstrated high diagnostic accuracy and significantly outperformed that of both primary care physicians and dementia specialists in identifying clinical disease in patients with cognitive symptoms. As we’ve seen, these findings were quickly picked up by news media, by social media, leading, for example, to discussions about post approval cost and coverage for biomarker based diagnostics, thus contributing to the top Altmetric score that we identified for this publication.

Garth Sundem  11:05

Yeah, that’s just a big, big paper in general, in a big therapeutic area, all right, that that makes perfect sense why it made the list, connecting

Mike Taylor  11:17

it with the emerging Alzheimer treatments, yeah, that need to be delivered early. It’s huge. Yeah,

Garth Sundem  11:25

with, with impact, clinical impact, potentially very quickly. Yeah, I can see why that. Yeah, okay. Where are we going for number four,

Mike Taylor  11:34

all right? Well, you’re going to hear, we’re going to you’re going to hear a screeching of tires from the parking lot as we do a do a u turn here, because what we’re going to talk about here is a preprint. And it’s, I think the word that I would like to use in my polite British way, is it’s a curious preprint, as it appears to be, reporting on the persistence of an s1 spike protein, so COVID related after vaccination. This is a preprint. It is the most shared preprint of 2024 it’s had four and a half 1000 posts on X has not metrics scored over 2000 which is huge. Couple of really interesting things here. We ran those x posts through our AI thing to look at the sentiment, and it gave us an average value about minus half, which is bad, but not exceptionally bad, but wow, is it? Is it extreme? Shall we say? There’s a lot of people saying, Wow, this is extraordinary. This is, this is why people shouldn’t be taking vaccines and things like that. And then there’s other people like going, Well, I’m not going to use the words they use, because this is the family podcast or professional podcast anyway. So very, very polarized. And I guess the other thing is, you know, pre prints look amazing. I’m a big fan of preprints. Every paper I publish, as long as the journal supports it has a preprint. They work, they do need to be published. This preprint has not been published in a journal yet. If it does get submitted and accepted and published, the conflicts of interest statement could be very interesting. And I’m not going to say anything more than that, other than, you know, pre integrate. They get the information out there, but they’re not the same as a journal. Journals add real value. And, you know, editorial teams that take the time to to manage the quality of their their content, you cannot get away from that. We can’t, you know, preprints are, they have their own purpose, shall we say, but publish their property.

Garth Sundem  13:49

And this is an example of what, yeah, for better or really interesting nerve. So hugely shared sentiment mixed, very polarized. Any publicity is good publicity. I’m not sure that’s true, but this is the case there. Okay, where are we going? For number five, you’re

Mike Taylor  14:10

sticking with me. This is a lancet oncology paper I’m not going to read out because, largely because I can’t pronounce most of those words. It concerns a treatment for a very rare disease. So it’s a rare disease that follows another rare disease, so rare upon rare Okay, and I came across this paper in the times. So when I was reading, reading the newspaper of my breakfast, I came across this. And the reason I came across this paper, which is Mahadeo et al, launched oncology january 2024 it’s reporting the results of the allele trial. And if this is related to the Epstein and Epstein Barr Virus positive post transport disease. The reason why. It got so much coverage despite the fact that it’s rare on rare and rare is that the team, who’ve supported the communications now, whether that’s the authors or whether it’s the farmer, have done a really great job at connecting this treatment which affects, you know, maybe two figures of folk in the UK, so maybe three figures in the US per year. But this is more about the platform. This is about T cell therapists. This is about off the shelf T cell therapists. So it’s a transformational story, but the way that it’s been communicated is remarkable and brilliant, because they have done such a good job at explaining the science and putting a human face on it. And again, you know, this is rare diseases. It’s so easy to get lost in the weeds, but they’re not going out to the park. As far as I’m concerned, got an Altmetric score of 204 which for a rare disease, is quite exceptional. A lot of this is very high quality coverage as well. And not everything gets a good size article in the Times. This, this is one of those. Oh, that’s

Garth Sundem  16:04

neat. So using a study as a springboard into, you know, T cell therapies, which is, which is at, which is at the top of mind, what an E communications team win? Okay, yeah,

Mike Taylor  16:17

absolutely, absolutely celebrating.

Carrie Brubaker  16:20

If the group doesn’t mind, I wouldn’t mind taking the opportunity to report the full title of the of the article, just for audiences that are that are keyed in. So thanks for joining taboeclu For allergenic hematopoietic stem cell or solid organ transplant recipients with Epstein Barr Virus positive post transplant lymphoproliferative disease after failure of rituximab or rituximab and chemotherapy. This is the allele trial, a phase three multicenter open label trial.

Garth Sundem  16:57

Okay, Carrie, remind me what your PhD is in biomedical engineering. There we go. Okay, oh, biomedical Yeah, okay, so I guess that’s how we get the pronunciation correct. All right. Onward, onward. Let me look at my list six. We’re going to number six. All

Carlos Areia  17:15

right, yeah. So okay, so this is quite an interesting one, probably quite well known as well. This is, and I’ll try and be as good as Carrie, trying to spell out the name exact I’m glossy that is, oh, gonna go for Carrie. Gonna try and tell the title for me, if you don’t mind, because it’s another mouthful Gary read as the

Carrie Brubaker  17:43

title, exogan co gene, auto temple.

17:47

There we go.

Mike Taylor  17:50

Cell disease.

Carlos Areia  17:54

So this is a non viral cell therapy that utilizes crisp cast nine gene editing to reactivate fetal hemoglobin synthesis in patients with severe sickle cell disease. This is by Hadar frangul at all, and it was published in New England Journal in April. And this is a phase three study that involved 44 patients aged between 12 to 35 years old and demonstrated that 97% of those evaluated were free from vaso occlusive crisis for at least 12 consecutive months after receiving XSL, thank God they gave an acronym to this drug. All patients in the study were free from the from hospitalizations for vaso occlusive crisis for at least 12 months, which is, I think, one of the best improvements in the sickle cell conditions. But this is curious, because this is the top most cited in policy documents, and this was published in April. And this is interesting because, well, as we all know, policy citations many times, often take years, sometimes decades, after a publication, whereas the first policy citation on this happened a month later. So this in total, had three, three policy citations in the same year and in a month later, it was cited by the cannabis drug agency as part of a reimbursement review. And the expert committee meeting will happen next week for re for a reimbursement decision, fingers crossed, and the decision is expected in late November, early December. Another citation was by the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services in us, same thing stating that it does represent a substantial clinical improvement over existing technologies, because this offers a treatment option for certain patients with sickle cell disease who are not eligible for bone marrow transplant due to lack of. Of HLA matching, or who experience recurrent voes. So yeah, so this might be also reimbursed in the US. So yeah, this is not one of the biggest Altmetric scores. It’s 445 but this April already has like 42 citations. So it’s a big moving paper, especially in the policy sphere,

Garth Sundem  20:23

right? So it’s not always the number of citations. If you get it cited in policy documents, that counts for a lot. CRISPR to reactivate hemoglobin and any JM, okay. Number seven,

Mike Taylor  20:39

back to Carrie.

Carrie Brubaker  20:42

We’re we’re moving on to another type of of citation, and in this case, I will be discussing, in the year 2024 the most cited publications within patents. Oh, and in in fact this, this represents a pair of related papers. So in January of this year, two studies were published in parallel by nicio et Alia in cancer research communications and by kawazue Adalia in clinical cancer research. These publications describe the outcomes of two phase two analyzes of treatment with a liposomal formulation of a chemotherapeutic agent in combination with an immune checkpoint inhibitor in the disease settings of lung and gastric cancer, respectively. So the full titles of these publications are as follows, phase two study of the liposomal formulation of a ribulin in combination with nivolumab results from the small cell lung cancer cohort and phase two study of the liposomal formulation of a ribulin in combination with nivolumab results from the gastric cancer cohort, as Carlos alluded to in the previous publication. It is often the case that years passed before technical or clinical publications are cited in patents, which are then themselves published. We discovered in our analysis of most cited publications in patents that this year, three patent notifications related to the art of this liposomal composition were published in the month of July, all three of which cite the two peer reviewed clinical publications that I just described. Some publication professionals may find it worthwhile to explore such connections between medical communications and patent outputs, for example, over time, as part of a broader publication strategy that’s

Garth Sundem  22:44

interesting, the patents, okay, we’ve got to keep moving here. Let’s go to number eight. All

Carlos Areia  22:51

right, number eight, we’ll get going to go back to Altimetric score, but now it’s the top active clinical trial. So not a publication, not a publication about a clinical trial, the clinical trial itself. And this is a very well, well known one. It’s the keynote 942 so it’s the phase two randomized study of adjuvant immunotherapy with the personalized cancer vaccine mRNA for 4157 and pembrolizumab versus pembrolizumab alone after complete resection of high risk melanoma. Again, this is the keynote 942 and it’s on clinical trials gov. So this is interesting because, well, usually, clinical trial registrations get little to no attention at all, and this trial in particular, as an impressive Altmetric score of 1685 mostly in x or formally Twitter, which more than 2000 posts and discussions around it. So the people that don’t know, the purpose of this trial is to assess whether post operative, adjuvant therapy with the mRNA technology and pembrolizumab improves recurrence, pre survival compared to pembrolizumab alone. In participants with complete complete resection of the cutaneous melanoma and high risk of recurrence. The phase two trial was published in The Lancet, and it doesn’t have an Altmetric score even near the clinical trial. So that’s why I thought it was interesting. So the ultimate trick score of the lancet paper that was published this year in January was 354 where there was, like an indication that this combination therapy significantly prolonged recurrence, free survival, and there was it so very encouraging results, and they must train thing like there was the manageable safety profile at around two years mark, trial will continue, and we they these patients will be followed up in. Think five or more years even, and that’s why this is still an active trial. So yeah, just a quick side note, unfortunately, after digging in inside the publication, I just found out that the lead author of this publication has recently died, which was the Melanoma Research pioneer. It was called Dr Jeffrey Weber, and he has led a lot of important trials, including this one, sorry, a quick, sad note, but I think it was, it is important to recognize the important work of this,

Mike Taylor  25:35

of this researcher, okay, an outstanding Kol,

Garth Sundem  25:39

outstanding researcher. Let’s go on to number nine.

Mike Taylor  25:45

Thanks, Garth. So number nine is our second menopause paper. So this is Elin Zant for the treatment of vaso motor symptoms associated with menopause Oasis one and two RCTs Pinkerton at El published in JAMA 2024 this has got not metric score of 810 and if you look at the data that’s driving that value, there’s a lot of news attention on there, a lot of news stories. And I think that this is the kind of phenomenon that we’ve been seeing of the last year or two, which is that increased profile, that increased attention for the menopause as being a treatable condition, and not just like one of those things women have to go through really, really interesting. Not much social media going on there feels to me very much like a me too, kind of moment where changes in like the discourse, the public discourse really drive attention around the research in the same space, you know, people are looking for menopause stories, there’s no shame talking about it. It requires talking about most people, a large percentage of population, will experience hot flashes. They are a horrible symptom that can be make your life miserable for years, and anything that can believe that is a good thing. I really wanted to point out there is a fantastic interview on YouTube with Pinkerton, led by jammer, 200,000 subscribers on that that will really help the news coverage. So all of those news stories that are that are covered this particular paper, they are going to be they’ll have seen that video. They’ll have taken notes from it. They will have used sound clips from it. It really again. You know, another massive win for further communication strategy around this very important paper, in my view.

Garth Sundem  27:38

Okay,

Mike Taylor  27:39

I’m gonna go onto the tent if this is okay. Garth, perfect, yeah, okay, sorry. Do you have a question about the that page? No, no, no,

Garth Sundem  27:48

I was gonna say, Let’s go to the tent quickly, because my Zoom can cut us off in three minutes here. Mike, okay,

Mike Taylor  27:53

Oh, sorry, right. So the last paper is actually two papers. Their papers are about TB. 10 million people are infected by TB every year, 1 million die. It’s incredibly hard. Antibiotic resistance is a great problem. It’s incredibly hard to treat. There are two papers here that really yelled at me. There is one, diacon et al in Nature Medicine, which is looking at a new treatment for tuberculosis. But the one that I love, which broke all the rules to include is increased TB case detection, Tanzanian children and adults using African giant pouched rats in published in BMC infectious diseases got not metric score of one, which is me posting about it, because I pay them. 20 pounds a year, sorry, 20 pounds a month in in charity funding, they their giant patch rats are faster, more more quick, as it were, they say, do more testing. They do it on smaller quantities of sputum. They are more accurate than lab testing, and you get the results the same day, rather than having to wait a week for the results to come back from a lab. They’re also cheaper to maintain, and they work harder than people in laboratories, we need more giant pouch rats detecting TB in order to stop 1 million people, 1 million people dying every year from TB.

Garth Sundem  29:10

Okay, well, I think we may have to wait until next time to dig in more on the strategy of how to, how to, I don’t know, replicate these votes so we had physician sentiment for Latin IB. We had nurse sentiment, and across many different patient populations that study was relevant. We had a huge score for the Alzheimer biomarkers blood test. We had this curious preprint for the COVID SPIKE protein after vaccination with mixed sentiment. We had the rare disease published in Lancet that the communications team was able to connect with T cell therapies. We had CRISPR to reactivate hemoglobin, published in any JM top, cited in policy documents. We had two pubs. Things that were most cited in patent documents, the clinical trial of pembrolizumab, combination therapy, motor symptoms in menopause, that got a lot of popular news attention, and then we had Mike’s rats in TB that has the potential to affect a patient population of 10 million. I think it is so interesting just to point out, as we close here, that there’s many things that make a good paper, and that I am positive depends on your strategy and the impact you are trying to create. You can pick one of these ways to measure your success. So thanks Mike Carlos and Carrie for joining us today to learn more about how your organization can partner with Altmetric. Visit altmetric.com maps members. Don’t forget to subscribe, and we hope you enjoyed this episode of the Medical Affairs professional society podcast series elevate the.