Publications

Patients with cancer are considered to be at high-risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe COVID-19 (Bakouny et al., 2020). Our “SOAP-02” (Sars-CoV-2 fOr cAncer Patients) study has assessed their responses to COVID-19 vaccination. Our interim results provided safety and immune efficacy data for any COVID-19 vaccine in an immunocompromised patient population and showed that at 3 weeks following a single dose of BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine, seroconversion was conspicuously low (38%) in patients with solid cancer and very low (<20%) in patients with hematologic cancer (Monin et al., 2021). Importantly, however, a small sub-cohort of patients with solid cancer who received a second dose of vaccine at day 21 after the first shot showed substantially increased seroconversion (95%) as measured 2 weeks later. Conversely, too few patients with hematologic cancer had received a second shot at day 21 to permit their interim reporting. Recently, it was reported that a subset of patients with hematologic cancer failed to develop humoral responses despite receiving two vaccine doses 21 days apart (Addeo et al., 2021; Greenberger et al., 2021; Thakkar et al., 2021). However, no data are available regarding whether such patients might be seroconverted by delaying the second dose, which became UK government policy on December 29, 2020 and as has been considered by other nations. The completed results of the SOAP-02 study presented here provide those data.