STAT

New "Weekly Update" has landed! We have Pfizer’s sickle cell drug gets pulled off the market. Plus, Akeso’s global ambitions, 23andMe needs saving, and more. Read now ?

Gilead has reached licensing deals with companies to make generic versions its #HIV drug lenacapavir for 120 mostly low- and lower-middle-income countries. Lenacapavir, a twice-yearly HIV medicine, is already approved for treating HIV, but has a hefty price tag of $42,250. Gilead is hoping its licensing plan will appease critics. https://trib.al/Gjhlh5C

U.S. health officials have run into obstacles in their efforts to determine whether a Missouri person infected with H5N1 bird flu passed the virus on to others. There is still no explanation of how the individual contracted the virus and the delay to an answer is fueling concerns. https://trib.al/kvH3UMP

A new neural map, or connectome, of an adult fruit fly's brain could help researchers better understand how to treat diseases like #Alzheimers and #Parkinsons. Mapping the brain is a daunting task. It took almost 50 labs around the world to complete this project which was published Wednesday in a series of papers in Nature. But access to the full connectome could represent a new era for #neuroscience. Read more here: https://trib.al/14r4611

Micky Tripathi is the top AI official in the Department of Health and Human Services spearheading much of President Biden’s agenda for regulating how artificial intelligence is used in health care. He’s also responsible for a crucial HHS reorganization meant to streamline how disparate agencies within the department set standards for AI, invest in it, or pay for its use across the nation’s health care system. Tripathi’s success, or failure, could have a huge impact on how this technology with transformative potential is adopted across the health care system. With a lack of people, resources, and enforcement authority, it's an uphill battle. https://trib.al/lkz0Dy8 #AI #artificialintelligence #healthcare #AIinhealthcare

Abridge says it’s launching a new research effort to examine the technology’s impact on five dimensions: “clinician experience, patient experience, healthcare costs, outcomes, and health equity.” That bit of news and plenty more in the latest edition of STAT's #healthtech newsletter. https://trib.al/9PL5for

Stanford professor James Zou examined the clinical adoption of medical AI devices in two recent papers. He found that only a handful of FDA-authorized devices are being reimbursed at any kind of scale. Zou discussed his research work with Katie Palmer and also touched on why the value-based care model may hold important lessons for startups developing AI tools for health systems. Read more from the interview: https://trib.al/sGjyaqC #medicine #tech #technology #healthtech #AI #artificialintelligence #AIinmedicine

$3.5 billion. $11 million. $4.1 million. Those three numbers represent how much #healthcare CEOs made combined in 2023, the average a chief executive brought home in 2023, and the median health care CEO pay in 2023. “Health care is about caring for people … Someone making millions of dollars off of people’s ill health feels like it’s a moral disconnect," said Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Believe it or not, those numbers are actually lower than 2022 figures. So, what's happening? Read STAT's exclusive roundup of pay packages: https://trib.al/t1d0Wni

?? A new story in STAT's Coercive Care investigation examining how physicians have steered sickle cell patients toward sterilization is out now ?? In the fourth installment of this series, a Johns Hopkins analysis commissioned by STAT shows that the rate of postpartum sterilization is significantly higher in Americans with sickle cell disease than in those without. Between 2012 and 2019, 8.8% of deliveries to people with the condition ended in tubal sterilization, while 6.7% of births to unaffected mothers did. The contrast becomes more extreme when identifying certain parts of the country. In Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the postpartum sterilization rate is 13.7% for those who have sickle cell and 8.1% for those who don’t. These numbers can’t tell us why each sterilization took place. But the analysis does prompt questions about equity and good practice. Is tubal sterilization overused with certain kinds of patients in certain places? To what extent do those patients have true autonomy? Would these patterns be different if there were more equal access to good care? Read Eric Boodman's piece here: https://trib.al/KaM9P6F

Eli Lilly will invest $4.5 billion to create the Lilly Medicine Foundry, which the drug giant says will be the first-ever facility to combine research and manufacturing in a single location. Will it solve biotech's manufacturing bottleneck pickle? https://trib.al/XWsOhaS