Welcome to Benchmarks, a weekly collection of research news and notes featuring Mass General investigators. With a research community of over 9,500 people that spans more than 30 departments centers and institutes, there’s more news each week that we can get to. Here are a few highlights:

How Long Will Your COVID Booster Last? It Depends

How often should you get a COVID-19 booster vaccine? Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital led by Rakesh Jain, PhD, have designed a mathematical model that could help provide an answer. 

Produced in collaboration with the University of Cyprus, the model can predict how effective COVID-19 boosters are in the long-term for different patient populations, including healthy people and those with suppressed immune systems.

The resulting article was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) earlier this week. Read more on Boston.com.

Machine Learning Model Predicts Risk of Melanoma Recurrence

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School led by Yevgeniy R. Semenov, MD, have developed machine learning-based methods to predict which patients with early-stage melanoma have the highest risk for disease recurrence.

“Clearly, not everyone who has early-stage disease will experience a recurrence,” Semeov says in an interview with Healio.

“If we look at historical data, only about 20% to 30% of even the stage IIB and IIC groupings would experience recurrence, but that would mean giving these immunotherapies to 100% of patients in a situation where maybe only 20% to 30% would benefit.”

Semenov and colleagues amassed 1,720 early-stage melanomas and extracted 36 clinical and pathologic features of these cancers from electronic health records to predict patients’ recurrence risk with machine learning algorithms.

“It’s a very comprehensive array of clinical history variables, demographics and tumor synoptic features extracted from the pathology report. We don’t just look at a small set — it was 36 features altogether. In combination, we found that if you do this, you tend to get better performance than if you simply rely on what has been historically used for staging.” Read more.

Free Spike Antigen ID’d in Post-SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Myocarditis

Lael M. Yonker, MD, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues prospectively collected blood from 16 patients who were hospitalized for myocarditis after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination.

Extensive antibody profiling was performed and results were compared to those from 45 healthy, asymptomatic, age-matched vaccinated controls.

The researchers found that extensive antibody profiling and T-cell responses were essentially indistinguishable for individuals who developed postvaccine myocarditis and those of vaccinated controls, despite a modest increase in cytokine production.

Individuals with postvaccine myocarditis had markedly elevated levels of full-length spike protein, unbound by antibodies, in their plasma, while no free spike was detected in asymptomatic vaccinated controls. Read more on Healthday.

Tweets of the Week

This Week in Mass General History

Mass General Researchers Report that Cancer is Not Contagious

January 11, 1905—Cancer Is pronounced a non-contagious malady by Harvard medical experts who have been investigating the subject for two years, reports the Evening Statesman Newspaper of Walla Walla Washington.

“The report of Dr. E. H. Nichols, as head of the cancer commission, which has been studying the matter at both the Harvard Medical School and at the Massachusetts General Hospital, is to be made public. This will demonstrate to the satisfaction of the most researching that cancer is not infectious, and is an hereditary affliction.

The remedies the commissioner will report are either a knife or a serum. What will appear surprising about the Nicholas report is that a black eye is given to the much landed X-ray and Finsen-ray treatments. Neither is admitted to be of any use,” the paper reports. Read more.

Fatigue Researcher Gains Insights by Watching Passengers at North Station

Jan 10, 1962 — In the Brain Wave Laboratory of the Massachusetts General Hospital, the director, Dr. Robert S. Schwab, a Harvard assistant clinical professor of neurology, has been carrying on fatigue research since 1937.

One basic fact which has emerged from his measurements of fatigue in brain cells, nerves, and muscles is that the brain says “I can’t” long before the muscles lose their power to go on working.

He has made some observations at Boston’s North Station, where, for the past three years, he has worked out the distances a traveller will run to catch a train when there are only three to get him home in time to dinner. “Missing the last train,” explains Dr. Schwab, “means a five-dollar to ten-dollar taxi ride or the need to spend the night in the city.

“As a result of this increased motivation. subjects throw dignity to the winds, drop packages, and sprint anywhere from 60 to 70 yards down the platform.” Read more.

About the Mass General Research Institute
Research at Massachusetts General Hospital is interwoven through more than 30 different departments, centers and institutes. Our research includes fundamental, lab-based science; clinical trials to test new drugs, devices and diagnostic tools; and community and population-based research to improve health outcomes across populations and eliminate disparities in care.
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