Health

Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, has released a new photograph of herself and shared with the public that she is making “good progress” on her recovery from cancer.

She also gave royal watchers something to look forward to, writing that she will make her first public appearance since announcing her cancer diagnosis, riding in the parade at King Charles’ birthday celebration this weekend.

In a statement shared to social media Friday, the Princess says she has experienced “good days and bad days” while going through chemotherapy.

“On those bad days you feel weak, tired and you have to give in to your body resting. But on the good days, when you feel stronger, you want to make the most of feeling well,” she wrote.

The post, a rare show of vulnerability from a member of the Royal Family, explained that Middleton is still undergoing treatment “and will be for a few more months.”

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‘I am well’: Kate Middleton reveals cancer diagnosis in video released by Palace

On her good days, Middleton said, she spends her time focusing on her kids’ school life, tending to aspects of life that bring joy, energy and positivity, and she’s even “starting to do a little work from home.”

The post features a new photograph of the Princess, standing under a large tree near a pond, looking upward, dressed in a beige blazer, skinny jeans and white sneakers.

Well-wishers can likely catch a glimpse of Middleton travelling in a carriage during Saturday’s Trooping the Colour, King Charles’ birthday parade, with her children. She is also expected to stand on the balcony with other members of the Royal Family, as per the yearly tradition.

She also wrote that she hopes to “join a few public engagements over the summer,” but acknowledges she’s “not out of the woods yet.”

“I am learning how to be patient, especially with uncertainty. Taking each day as it comes, listening to my body, and allowing myself to take this much needed time to heal,” she concluded, before thanking the public for their support.

Saturday’s appearance will be the first time Middleton has appeared in public since Christmas Day. She stepped back from duties in January, revealing she had undergone abdominal surgery for a non-cancerous issue.

However, in March she revealed that doctors had found an undisclosed type of cancer in the aftermath of her surgery and she had begun chemotherapy treatment.

The Princess has not appeared in public or taken on any formal duties since her cancer announcement, instead asking for privacy and understanding while she focuses on her recovery and spends time with her family.

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&copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved Eli Lilly’s treatment for early Alzheimer’s, making it the second therapy for slowing progression of the brain-wasting disease that will be available to U.S. patients.

The approval for donanemab, to be sold under the brand name Kisunla, followed the recommendations of the agency’s outside experts, who unanimously backed its use in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease, saying the benefits of the drug outweighed its risks.

“This is real progress,” said Joanne Pike of the Alzheimer’s Association. “Having multiple treatment options is the kind of advancement we’ve all been waiting for — all of us who have been touched, even blindsided, by this difficult and devastating disease.”

Like Eisai 4523.T and Biogen’s BIIB.O rival drug Leqembi, which was approved a year ago, donanemab is designed to clear an Alzheimer’s-related protein called beta amyloid from the brain.

A key differentiating factor for donanemab is the drug’s finite dosing, which allows patients to stop taking the treatment once brain scans no longer show amyloid plaques.

Lilly priced its drug at $695.65 per vial, or about $32,000 for 12-months of treatment consisting of 13 infusions. That’s slightly higher than Eisai’s Leqembi, which costs $26,500 a year.

BMO analyst Evan Seigerman said the price reflects the fact that patients can stop treatment versus chronic treatment with Leqembi.

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“The details of how it will play out in clinical practice are still unclear, but I think it will save a lot of money and patients will like that a lot better,” said Dr. Erik Musiek, a Washington University neurologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

“I think that, coupled with the monthly dosing, will make this an attractive option,” he added.

In Lilly’s large, late-stage trial, donanemab slowed the progression of memory and thinking problems by 29 per cent compared with a placebo. It also caused brain swelling in nearly a quarter of patients and brain bleeding in nearly a third, but most cases were mild.

As it did for Leqembi, the FDA placed its strongest “boxed” safety warning on donanemab’s prescribing label, flagging the risk of potentially dangerous brain swelling and bleeding.

One key difference is that donanemab will require five MRI scans to check for side effects, while Leqembi requires four, which could be an advantage for the Eisai drug in centers where such scans are scarce, RBC Capital analyst Brian Abrahams said in a research note.

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Eisai and Biogen have started submitting data to the FDA to support approval of a monthly maintenance dose to be given as an IV infusion, as well as a weekly injected version of Leqembi that patients could receive at home.

Lilly’s drug is expected to be used mostly by patients enrolled in the U.S. government’s Medicare health plan for people age 65 and older. Medicare last year began covering Alzheimer’s drugs that receive standard FDA approval.

Morningstar analyst Damien Conover said he expects Lilly’s drug to generate peak annual sales of over $5 billion, and “a fairly evenly split market between donanemab and Biogen’s Leqembi.”

More than six million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

London: AstraZeneca said on Tuesday its blockbuster cancer drug, Imfinzi, failed to improve disease-free survival in a late-stage trial to treat a type of early-stage lung cancer.

Imfinzi is a human monoclonal antibody, which works to block a tumour’s ability to evade and dampen the immune system, while also boosting the body’s anti-cancer immune response, offering an alternative to chemotherapy.

The ADJUVANT BR.31 Phase III trial did not meet the primary endpoint of disease-free survival versus a placebo in early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer after tumour removal in patients whose tumours express PD-L1 on 25 per cent or more tumour cells, the drugmaker said.

“We are disappointed in the ADJUVANT BR.31 results,” said Susan Galbraith, executive vice president of oncology R&D at AstraZeneca.

The latest results were a contrast to the ones published in April, when the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker said Imfinzi, in a separate trial, helped improve survival in patients in the early stages of small-cell, or aggressive type, of lung cancer, meeting two key trial goals.

(Reporting by Yadarisa Shabong in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)

Against the backdrop of the Caribbean Sea, Ontario couple Matt Lassaline and Kirsten Whiteley got married in Jamaica last month in a small beach wedding ceremony that was everything they had imagined.

Having bought a house in 2021 and with a mortgage to pay off, the couple didn’t want to put themselves in more financial strain with a big expensive wedding.

“I think we wanted to do something nice, but at the same time cost-effective and we were surprised with how cost-effective doing a destination wedding was,” Whiteley said in an interview with Global News.

“We were really pleased with how it turned out.”

The one-week vacation, including the wedding ceremony in Trelawny, cost them roughly $18,000.

Being at the resort for a week also gave them an opportunity to spend more time with their guests, rather than having to rush through meeting everyone in a single day, Lassaline said.

Despite soaring travel costs, Canadian interest in destination weddings appears to be growing.

Some wedding specialists and travel agents told Global News they’ve noticed a spike in the number of couples choosing beach resorts for their big day and at a much lower cost than the price of a traditional wedding in their hometowns.

“The demand for destination weddings has increased tenfold since the pandemic,” said Susan Gill, a wedding specialist at Escapes.ca in Vancouver.

While the pent-up demand to travel is a big motivation for these multi-day wedding celebrations in scenic locations, affordability is top of mind for many.

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Destination weddings in Travel Tips

Zerlene Mekdeci, a destination wedding specialist at Vacation Travel Group in the Greater Toronto Area, said it feels like more and more people are taking this route because it is very expensive to host a wedding at home.

“Historically, about 15 per cent of Canadians would do a destination wedding,” she said in an interview with Global News.

“People are finding that it is now a great option.”

Mekdeci estimates that the cost of a typical destination wedding down south with 100 people attending – which is usually not the case – would be roughly $30,000, versus $60,000 for a wedding with a similar guest count and bells and whistles in Toronto.

Since not everyone can travel, the average size for a destination wedding is about 40 people, which helps cut costs to about $18,000 to $20,000, Mekdeci said.

“The guest count really is one of the biggest determinants of your overall budget because you’re basically paying per person for people,” she said.

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On top of the all-inclusive vacation, a destination wedding package can cover the ceremony, bouquets, food, drinks, wedding cake, music, hairstyling and makeup as well as photography.

Anything you add in terms of décor, live band or other entertainment will obviously increase the bill.

“The benefit of doing a destination wedding is that you have the backdrop of the palm trees and the ocean and the beautiful weather and scenery that you don’t need to go spend a ton of money then putting in all this décor,” Mekdeci said.

Planning a wedding at home can also be more “time-consuming,” Gill said, as you go through each tiny detail of how the day will unfold.

Leslie Rose from Newfoundland and her fiancé are getting married in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in October 2025.

The couple are planning week-long festivities, including a rehearsal day, a wedding reception and other resort activities in between.

She said her family loves to travel, which is one of the reasons they decided to go down this route, and the full week allows them to spend more time with their loved ones.

“When thinking about the wedding, we really wanted that quality time with everyone and have a big celebration besides that one day,” Rose said.

The full week will cost the couple between $12,000 and $15,000.

“We are financially going to be able to do our dream wedding for less money than it would be in Canada,” Rose said.

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Cost-of-living concerns are weighing on many Canadians’ plans to get away this summer, recent polling shows.

On top of that, everything related to travel, from flights to hotels, has become more expensive, which is something couples and their guests have to consider, wedding specialists say.

“One of the concerns is the cost to the guests — that’s the one thing I hear from couples all the time,” Mekdeci said.

To cut expenses, couples can explore different options for the destination and the time of the year for their wedding.

Merkdeci said Mexico and the Dominican Republic are popular choices because they are relatively more affordable than places like Aruba or Antigua.

Prices will be lower from the summer months to fall compared with the high season, which is Christmas going into March break.

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Some wedding packages also have promotions, like one guest free for every 10 guests, Mekdeci said.

People can play around with the duration of their stay to make the trip less expensive, she added.

While Rose and her fiancé will be staying for more than a week in Jamaica, she said they are giving their guests the option to stay for a shorter duration if they want.

Lois Barbour, owner of Travel Time Agency in St. John’s, N.L., said people can use their points or miles to trim the airfare.

Despite the growing lure, destination weddings are not a “good fit” for everyone, especially if they have a Type A personality, Barbour said.

“Somebody who wants all of the details looked after months and months in advance and everything to the very finest, minute detail to be totally under their control are probably not a good fit for a destination wedding,” she said.

Dr. Shawna Pandya, a Brandon, Man.-born, Edmonton-raised physician and space scientist, is seeing a life-long dream become reality: she’s going to space.

“I will be flying to space with Virgin Galactic on their new Delta Class of spacecraft with Kellie Gerardi and Dr. Norah Patten of Ireland as early as 2026,” Pandya said.

She earned a degree in neuroscience from the University of Alberta, studying medicine, before taking her Masters at the International Space University in France. Since then, Pandya has worked as medical advisor to several space, medical and technology companies.

“You work in very international, interdisciplinary teams. I’ve worked with flight surgeons and physiologists and biomedical engineers. And to come full circle from those early Masters’ student days to actually flying payloads myself is a dream come true.”

This mission is a partnership between Virgin Galactic and the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS), of which Pandya is space medicine director.

The IIAS has been championing space and microgravity as the next great research laboratory, Pandya said, especially through commercial spaceflight.

“Traditionally, the path towards becoming an astronaut in space has been through government space agency selections, such as with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. In Canada, we’re small but mighty. We’ve had four ever CSA selections, which is really exciting, but this is just creating a whole new avenue to space,” she explained.

“Suborbital space flight has taken off — figuratively and literally.

“This is a novel mission profile,” Pandya said. “It’s a same-day mission. You go up and down. You have a very focused period of time in the zero-G (gravity) environment in which you can perform your science. You have to be very rehearsed, very practiced, very able to deal with the dynamicism of the zero-G environment and ready to perform.”

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Pandya has advised on missions, flown 10 zero-G campaigns, most of which were research flights, but this will be her first time in space.

The three research astronauts are women.

“It isn’t what we started out to do; it just happened to be we have the years of experience working together, we’ve flown together in zero-G (gravity), we’ve worked together in operations for so long, we know each other very well and just that caliber of excellence and that standard that we hold ourselves to. Norah and Kellie really embody that and I’m so proud to be flying with them,” Pandya told Global News.

This mission also marks a Canadian first. Pandya is the first named female commercial astronaut from this country.

“We’ve only had — including myself — four female Canadian astronauts to date,” Pandya added. “Women still are far in the minority when it comes to astronauts. They only make up 11-12 per cent. This is us helping to change that percentage and leading the way and holding the door open both for future explorers, for female astronauts, and for future researchers.”

1:43
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This is the second research mission that IIAS has done with Virgin Galactic. In November 2023, the crew tested how fluids behaved in low gravity to gather information on future medical technologies and life-support systems.

“It’s a fly-your-science experiment: figure out what data was really, really interesting and then optimize your payload to get deeper and greater amounts of data,” Pandya said.

She worked with American Gerardi on a previous mission, for which Pandya was the primary investigator for a space-worthy continuous glucose monitor.

“We know that longer-duration missions in space can predispose astronauts to insulin resistance and pre-diabetic states,” she said. “We just don’t know how quickly that occurs. So, the work that we’ve done, with putting the continuous glucose monitor first on parabolic flight and then in suborbital flight, really, are world firsts, and that’s incredibly exciting.”

It also could open up opportunities for people who would have otherwise been excluded, Pandya explained.

“From the government space agency perspective, having diabetes was previously a disqualifier for space flight. But now, proving the space-worthiness of the continuous glucose monitor and its ability to withstand the G loads of launch and landing and the weightless environment is another way to help democratize access to space.”

Pandya believes commercial spaceflight is also helping on that front. She says human space flight started as a technological and political showdown and featured military pilots. With the International Space Station, Pandya says it became more collaborative and featured scientists, engineers and pilots.

“Now, with the next era of space and increased access to space, we want to see all-comers,” she said. “We truly believe that space is for everyone. We believe it’s for the engineers like Nora, the physicians like myself, the mission operation leads like Kellie, but also, eventually, for the storytellers, the artists, the entrepreneurs.

“We’ve seen, historically, that when you give humans a platform, they’ll amaze you with their creativity and their inventiveness, so this is really a whole new era in human exploration.”

&copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

London: Savara said on Wednesday its experimental therapy met the main goal of a late-stage trial by improving a measure of lung function in patients with a rare disease that causes breathing difficulties, sending its shares up 31 per cent.

The therapy is being developed to treat patients with autoimmune pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (aPAP), which can lead to shortness of breath, cause scarring in the lungs and even lead to a need for a lung transplant.

The disease is estimated to affect less than 5,000 people in the United States, according to government data.

Savara’s inhaled therapy, molgramostim, helped improve a measure of lung capacity that tracks the ability of the lungs to transfer gas from inhaled air to red blood cells in blood capillaries in the lung, compared with a placebo.

Molgramostim was well-tolerated and the frequency of adverse events was generally similar between treatment groups, the drug developer said.

Savara plans to submit a marketing application for the therapy in the first half of 2025.

(Reporting by Pratik Jain in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Devika Syamnath)

These early studies “highlighted both the potential that we could learn from dogs, but also that we were going to need bigger sample sizes to do it really well,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute. And so, researchers began creating large citizen science projects, seeking DNA samples and data from dogs across the United States.

Pet owners rose to the challenge. The Golden Retriever Lifetime Study, which began recruiting in 2012, has been following more than 3,000 dogs in an effort to identify genetic and environmental risk factors for cancer, which is especially common in the breed. Since 2019, the Dog Aging Project, a long-term study of health and longevity, has enrolled nearly 50,000 dogs.

Dr. Karlsson’s own project, Darwin’s Dogs, is at 44,000 canines and counting. (Some 4,000 have had their genomes sequenced.) Researchers are mining the data for clues about bone cancer, compulsive behavior and other traits. Among the early findings: Although many behavioral traits, such as sociability and trainability, are heritable, they are widely distributed across the canine kingdom, and breed is a poor predictor of an individual dog’s personality.

This spring, Dr. Karlsson unveiled a much-anticipated expansion: Darwin’s Cats. “I’m a total cat person — have never owned a dog,” she said. Later, in an email, she added, “I’d love to know if ‘cat sleeps on your head’ is influenced by genetics.”

Data drivers

These projects were made possible as genomic sequencing got faster and more affordable. But the “tremendous enthusiasm” of pet owners has been integral, said Dr. Ostrander, who now leads the Dog10K project, an effort to build a comprehensive global catalog of canine genetic diversity.