Editor’s note: Here’s an excerpt from an article in The BMJ. To read the piece in its entirety, click here.
Fully vaccinated people with cancer who have no history of SARS-CoV-2 infection have much lower levels of neutralizing antibodies against the Delta variant (54%) than against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus (83%), a study has found.
The Capture study, conducted by the Francis Crick Institute and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, analyzed the immune responses of 585 patients with different types of cancer after they received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
The researchers found that just 31% of infection naive patients with blood cancer developed neutralizing antibodies against the Delta variant, compared with 62% of patients with solid cancers. The response was 68% overall in patients who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 50% in recipients of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
Patients were recruited from May 2020 to June 2021. The median age was 60, and 60% were male. Overall, 31% (181/585) had prior confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Around three quarters of participants (447/585) had a current diagnosis of a solid cancer, and 24% (138/585) had blood cancer.
Read the entire The BMJ article here.
