(This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays.)

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) -Cancer patients who received mRNA-based COVID vaccines within 100 days of starting treatment with widely used immunotherapies were twice as likely to be alive three years after beginning treatment, researchers reported.

Among 180 such patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who received an mRNA-based COVID vaccine from Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech, the median survival, or the point at which half the patients had died, was 37.33 months. Among 704 cancer patients who did not receive an mRNA COVID shot, median survival was 20.6 months.

Among patients with metastatic melanoma – the most deadly form of skin cancer – half of the 167 patien

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