11-year-old Jonathan Varghese is on his way to being just a normal healthy kid thanks to his “heroes” at MSK. After a routine tonsillectomy in August 2015, his doctors, concerned that there was something more going on, sent his tissues for screening. It was then that they learned he had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). With a recommendation from an oncologist friend in Boston, Jonathan began a two-year intensive chemotherapy protocol developed at MSK under the supervision of Dr. Peter Steinherz. With this therapy, there was a 90% success rate for patients treated at the hospital. Jonathan only has a few months left of his protocol. “His prognosis is excellent,” Steinherz said. “The first year is the riskiest. Over the next two years, he has about a 10% risk of something coming back.”

Dr. Lorenz Studer was part of a team of researchers from MSK and Weill Cornell that screened over 1,000 FDA-approved drugs and traditional medicines to determine which, if any, could block the Zika Virus in human fetal brain cells. The team found that the compound hippeastrine hydrobromide, an active ingredient of the medicinal plant Lycoris radiata (red spider lily), was able to not only block the infection in the fetal brain cells, but also eliminated preexisting Zika infection. The compound also showed promise in infected brains of adult mice.

Kent Sepkowitz, the Deputy Physician-in-Chief of Quality and Safety at MSK, an Infectious Disease Specialist, and a Game of Thrones fan, highlights how Hollywood is not always the most adept at providing historically accurate depictions, especially when it comes to healthcare and modern medicine. His assessment of the season premier of Season 7 of Game of Thrones tackles the odd appearance of rubber gloves in a storyline depicting contact isolation and hygiene, three concepts foreign to the medieval world. Sepkowitz provides a brief background to the invention of rubber gloves along with his analysis of last week’s plot.