Obinutuzumab, REGENCY, & Updates in Lupus Nephritis, With Brad Rovin, MD pca.st/episode/ef70...

Democrat Michelle Wu has been re-elected Mayor of Boston.

What target cell(s) important for rheum disease? -T cells: because lots of antimetabolites we use work here -B cells: but would this only work for RTX responsive diseases? -plasma cells? -myeloid cells? Steroids, IL-1i, IL-6i are targeting here #ACR25

Drug development looks simpler from the onc viewpoint than rheum -mechanisms better understood -dx is done with bx -trials have uniform criteria -risk tolerance is different (clinicians and patients) -trying new things is more accepted #ACR25

Marcela Maus took the BCRC to the finish line by talking about CAR-T study design for rheum with lessons learned from onc #ACR25

#ACR25 - Sunday Plenary I 🌟

Abs 0772 Petri et al ❓ Are guidelines for kidney bx missing LN? They use a threshold of UPCR >= 0.5g/g In this study they looked at patients with SLE + UPCR 0.25-0.44g and did kidney bx. 👨‍👨‍👦 N=28; 20 ultimately diagnosed with LN. 🤔 Should the threshold for kidney bx in SLE be lowered? #ACR25

Abs 0776 Schmidt et al 💊 2 year outcomes of the SELECT-GCA RCT studying UPA 👨‍👨‍👦 N=181 re-randomized to continue UPA vs switch to PBO 69% continuing UPA maintained remission vs 29% switched to PBO UPA 15mg dose was a/w lower frequencies of serious infx but higher herpes zoster #ACR25

apropos of nothing

This is several days old. But amidst so much else id missed it. That’s a stunning number. No wonder they about-faced. Reminder of the power of consumers in oligarch era, not subject to the same kind of targeting.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊 💀Oct 25, 1914 Wilhelm Lexis died in Gottingen, Germany 🇩🇪 1875: The Lexis diagram, showing relations among age (cohort), calendar time, and life spans of individuals simultaneously. Revolutionized demography, making key variables visible

Monstrous.

JUST IN: The White House has begun DEMOLISHING portions of the East Wing of the White House to build Trump’s $250 million ballroom — despite earlier claiming it wouldn’t “interfere” with the existing White House structure. (Washington Post)

It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.

The White House is asking people not to share pictures of the East Wing because it’s even worse today.

Efficacy and Safety of Obinutuzumab in Active Lupus Nephritis www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/...

BREAKING NEWS: The FDA has approved Gazyva® (obinutuzumab) for the treatment of adults with #lupus nephritis. Gazyva is the fourth therapy for lupus to receive regulatory approval since 2011. Read the announcement: buff.ly/81tYgo7

Happy to announce that I'll give a talk on how we can make rigorous causal inference more mainstream 📈 You can sign up for the Zoom link here: tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRo...

World War 2 veterans, the original antifa, took part in the nationwide protests against the fascist Trump regime. #3E #NoKings #50501Movement #indivisible #wearetheflood

Erdos AI IDE for Data Scientists | Lotas www.lotas.ai/erdos looks like an interesting tool for exploratory analyses at least

I’m on a low-fiber diet for screening colonoscopy and I’m craving for my usual fresh fruits and nuts diet…

"It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has." – William Osler

ggplot2 4.0.0 www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09...

Bike lanes

Lego Land in Boston

V5 White at #rockspotclimbing

My colleague found me biking to work and sent me a picture

[General]: On Sequoia 15.1 (Intel) Emacs.app does not run and has permissions errors · Issue #742 · d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus github.com/d12frosted/h...

Demystifying Clone‐Censor‐Weighting to Studying Treatment Initiation Windows: An Example Using Publicly Available Synthetic Medicare Claims Data - Webster‐Clark - 2025 - Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety - Wiley Online Library

Mole toys from Prague (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lit...)

America Is on the Cusp of a Two-Tier Vaccine System - The Atlantic

ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! triggered a flood of Disney+ subscription cancellations, briefly overwhelming the cancellation webpage itself. open.substack.com/pub/beinglib...

Even with supposed clarity that this $100k fee is only for new H1B visa applications, there is a total lack of clarity right now (over a weekend, since this was a 5pm Friday EO) for what happens to current H1B visa holders in the US. This chaos is more cruelty.

Muzeum Station, Prague

Saphnelo self-administration TULIP-SC Phase III trial meets primary endpoint in SLE | The Pharmaletter (lupus trial being reproducible is amazing)

I didn’t know about this, and if I didn’t know about this, then you probably didn’t either. This should be my entire feed and it’s not and that’s a problem  This sit in has now been going on over 48 hours and I am just hearing about it now 1/

Since everyone’s finding old and new friends, take a moment to read my story, I’m a 32yo polio survivor because I was not vaccinated. Pass on my story, repeat it, tell it to any vaccine hesitate parent. No kid deserves vaccine preventable diseases www.voicesforvaccines.org/as-a-polio-s...

Leg braces - $20-$30k, I’ve had at LEAST 6 leg braces. Wheelchairs - $5k for manual with no bells and whistles, I’ve had 2 Medications - anywhere between $100-$2000 /month pending health issues Surgeries - 19 surgeries $40k to - $1m inc. hospital stays I had polio. This is the cost.

Dear Americans, welcome to the thrilling game of ‘Did this dictator die or just disappear for a day?’ We’ve been playing it with Putin and Lukashenko for decades. Enjoy the suspense.

New this week in ACR Open Rheumatology → HLA-B*58:01 testing before starting allopurinol may not be cost-effective https://doi.org/10.1002/acr2.70093 Sex differences in industry payments to US physician authors published in high-impact journals https://doi.org/10.1002/acr2.70078

Social Security whistleblower quits after saying Americans’ data was compromised - The Washington Post

I took this picture myself at the CDC protest today. These are among the hundreds of bullet holes in CDC headquarters windows, visible from the street. I heard today that the admin has no urgent plan to fix these windows. Imagine being a CDC employee going to work under these conditions

As if you needed another reason to be angry at RFK Jr. today: There are signals he wants to blow up the "liability shield" that has kept the U.S. vaccine industry strong for the last forty years (and has sped payments to harmed patients). Hugely dangerous. www.thebulwark.com/p/hhs-kenned...

Truth Social's dead, too

Donald Trump wants to turn the Federal Reserve into his own bank. We need to pause all Fed nominations amid his illegal takeover attempt and hold a hearing on how it will raise costs on American families instead.

The fact that no one in healthcare is at all surprised by this is just one more example of how our insurance system is not designed to help people or promote health.

Didn’t get a single alert about the CDC staff protests either

A plush toy my kids got from a crane game

Major research studies can't just be put on pause indefinitely and restarted again. If there is no funding in the immediate future: -research staff, many with valuable experience, are laid off -labs are closed down -recruited study participants donate their time to a study that won't be completed

"Although the Supreme Court ruled partially in the researchers’ favor, some scientists say the decision amounts to a de-facto win by the Trump administration, because the time and cost of challenging their terminations in a different court will be prohibitive." www.nature.com/articles/d41...