Sipuleucel-T: Autologous Cellular Immunotherapy for Men with Asymptomatic or Minimally Symptomatic Metastatic Castrate Resistant Prostate Cancer

Sipuleucel T is an autologous cellular immunotherapy designed to stimulate an immune response in men diagnosed with asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic metastatic castrate resistant (hormone refractory) prostate cancer. Sipuleucel T improves overall survival and provides an additional treatment option for this patient population

Forecasting and Conditional Projection Using Realistic Prior Distributions

This paper develops a forecasting procedure based on a Bayesian method for estimating vector autoregressions. The procedure is applied to ten macroeconomic variables and is shown to improve out-of-sample forecasts relative to univariate equations. Although cross-variables responses are damped by the prior, considerable interaction among the variables is shown to be captured by the estimates.We provide unconditional forecasts as of 1982:12 and 1983:3.We also describe how a model such as this can be used to make conditional projections and to analyze policy alternatives. As an example, we analyze a Congressional Budget Office forecast made in 1982:12.While no automatic causal interpretations arise from models like ours, they provide a detailed characterization of the dynamic statistical interdependence of a set of economic variables, which may help inevaluating causal hypotheses, without containing any such hypotheses themselves.

Propagation of Correlations in Quantum Lattice Systems

We provide a simple proof of the Lieb-Robinson bound and use it to prove the existence of the dynamics for interactions with polynomial decay. We then use our results to demonstrate that there is an upper bound on the rate at which correlations between observables with separated support can accumulate as a consequence of the dynamics.Comment: 10 page

Dispersive Estimates for Harmonic Oscillator Systems

We consider a large class of harmonic systems, each defined as a quasi-free dynamics on the Weyl algebra over $\ell^2(\mathbb{Z}^d)$. In contrast to recently obtained, short-time locality estimates, known as Lieb-Robinson bounds, we prove a number of long-time dispersive estimates for these models

Information, Animal Spirits, and the Meaning of Innovations in Consumer Confidence

Innovations to measures of consumer confidence convey incremental information about economic activity far into the future. Comparing the shapes of impulse responses to confidence innovations in the data with the predictions of a calibrated New Keynesian model, we find little evidence of a strong causal channel from autonomous movements in sentiment to economic outcomes (the "animal spirits" interpretation). Rather, these impulse responses support an alternative hypothesis that the surprise movements in confidence reflect information about future economic prospects (the "information" view). Confidence innovations are best characterized as noisy measures of changes in expected productivity growth over a relatively long horizon.

News Shocks

We implement a new approach for the identification of "news shocks" about future technology. In a VAR featuring a measure of aggregate technology and several forward-looking variables, we identify the news shock as the shock orthogonal to technology innovations that best explains future variation in technology. In the data, news shocks account for the bulk of low frequency variation in technology. News shocks are positively correlated with consumption, stock price, and consumer confidence innovations, and negatively correlated with inflation innovations. The disinflationary nature of news shocks is consistent with the implications of sensibly modified versions of a New Keynesian model.

On some fundamental results about higher-rank graphs and their C*-algebras

Results of Fowler and Sims show that every k-graph is completely determined by its k-coloured skeleton and collection of commuting squares. Here we give an explicit description of the k-graph associated to a given skeleton and collection of squares and show that two k-graphs are isomorphic if and only if there is an isomorphism of their skeletons which preserves commuting squares. We use this to prove directly that each k-graph {\Lambda} is isomorphic to the quotient of the path category of its skeleton by the equivalence relation determined by the commuting squares, and show that this extends to a homeomorphism of infinite-path spaces when the k-graph is row finite with no sources. We conclude with a short direct proof of the characterisation, originally due to Robertson and Sims, of simplicity of the C*-algebra of a row-finite k-graph with no sources.Comment: 21 pages, two pictures prepared using TiK

Activated lymphocyte recruitment into the tumor microenvironment following preoperative sipuleucel-T for localized prostate cancer.

BackgroundSipuleucel-T is a US Food and Drug Administration-approved immunotherapy for asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). Its mechanism of action is not fully understood. This prospective trial evaluated the direct immune effects of systemically administered sipuleucel-T on prostatic cancer tissue in the preoperative setting.MethodsPatients with untreated localized prostate cancer were treated on an open-label Phase II study of sipuleucel-T prior to planned radical prostatectomy (RP). Immune infiltrates in RP specimens (posttreatment) and in paired pretreatment biopsies were evaluated by immunohistochemistry (IHC). Correlations between circulating immune response and IHC were assessed using Spearman rank order.ResultsOf the 42 enrolled patients, 37 were evaluable. Adverse events were primarily transient, mild-to-moderate and infusion related. Patients developed T cell proliferation and interferon-γ responses detectable in the blood following treatment. Furthermore, a greater-than-three-fold increase in infiltrating CD3(+), CD4(+) FOXP3(-), and CD8(+) T cells was observed in the RP tissues compared with the pretreatment biopsy (binomial proportions: all P < .001). This level of T cell infiltration was observed at the tumor interface, and was not seen in a control group consisting of 12 concurrent patients who did not receive any neoadjuvant treatment prior to RP. The majority of infiltrating T cells were PD-1(+) and Ki-67(+), consistent with activated T cells. Importantly, the magnitude of the circulating immune response did not directly correlate with T cell infiltration within the prostate based upon Spearman's rank order correlation.ConclusionsThis study is the first to demonstrate a local immune effect from the administration of sipuleucel-T. Neoadjuvant sipuleucel-T elicits both a systemic antigen-specific T cell response and the recruitment of activated effector T cells into the prostate tumor microenvironment

Isolated Eigenvalues of the Ferromagnetic Spin-J XXZ Chain with Kink Boundary Conditions

We investigate the low-lying excited states of the spin J ferromagnetic XXZ chain with Ising anisotropy Delta and kink boundary conditions. Since the third component of the total magnetization, M, is conserved, it is meaningful to study the spectrum for each fixed value of M. We prove that for J>= 3/2 the lowest excited eigenvalues are separated by a gap from the rest of the spectrum, uniformly in the length of the chain. In the thermodynamic limit, this means that there are a positive number of excitations above the ground state and below the essential spectrum