Good morning! Medical challenges such as antibiotic resistance have long provided narrative tension in shows like Grey’s Anatomy. But what about a musical about it? Ask and you shall receive.
The wheels of the anti-pharmaceutical bus mirror Republican lines
A new dark money group, Americans for Pharma Reform, wants to raise awareness about the pharmaceutical industry’s nefarious practices. How are they doing it? With a bus tour of US election battleground states. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, the bus stopped outside a Packers football game. Group members handed out free coffee and doughnuts, and supporters wrote their names on the outside of the bus.
The basic idea is unusual: More than 60% of Americans view the pharmaceutical industry negatively. But the group’s website also includes references to more extreme positions, like restoring accountability to vaccine manufacturers and the idea that gender-affirming medicine benefits the industry. And whoever is funding the group is trying hard to keep their identity secret, reports STAT’s Rachel Koz Chan. Read more about the bus.
Is bird flu spreading in Missouri? What we know
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Friday that a second health care worker in Missouri developed infantile respiratory symptoms after caring for a patient who was hospitalized with H5N1 avian influenza. The patient was not tested for influenza because health officials were not aware of the symptoms until after he had recovered, when it was too late.
For those following the story: This is the second time a possible case linked to a confirmed case has come to light after the fact. Earlier this month, it was revealed that a household contact of a confirmed case and a health care worker who cared for that individual were also sick. The first health care worker tested negative for influenza. For the latest information, see Helen Branswell’s story in STAT.
After 40 years, does the Hatch-Waxman Act need an overhaul?
Earlier this month, I learned about the Hatch-Waxman Act in an explainer video from my colleague Anna Yeo. As you may already know, the 1984 bill essentially reformed the pharmaceutical industry to bring more affordable generic drugs to market. Lawmakers were trying to balance two competing priorities: increasing access to affordable generic drugs while maintaining incentives for companies to develop new drugs.
The bill has long been hailed as a successful balancing act, but not everyone agrees. In a First Opinion article, two experts who focus on lowering drug prices and oversight of political influence argue that Hatch-Waxman “has become a monopoly expansion machine that puts pharmaceutical company profits above public health.”
Is it time to take action and remake our institutions once again? “Anyone’s 40th birthday is a good time to reconsider where their life is heading, and important legislation is no exception,” the essay authors write. Read more.
Drug Companies and the FDA are Failing Americans Who Want to Quit Smoking
About 15 million Americans will try to quit smoking in 2022, most of whom will fail. Seven times as many people in the United States try to quit smoking each year as are diagnosed with cancer. Yet no new classes of smoking cessation drugs have been approved for nearly two decades.
Drug companies are largely focused on developing drugs to treat cancer, and experts say the FDA’s Centers for Drugs has delayed approval of two new treatment options in the past five years alone.
“After I’m dead, they’ll probably take up some of those ideas,” said Olivier George, a psychology professor who studies nicotine-inhibiting enzymes. For more, see STAT’s Nick Florko’s latest article.
Early Study: Black Patients with Advanced Breast Cancer Less Likely to Receive Immunotherapy
Black people with triple-negative breast cancer — a particularly aggressive form of cancer that disproportionately affects black women — were significantly less likely to receive immunotherapy than their white counterparts in a study of more than 10,000 patients. Findings presented this week at the American Cancer Society’s Health Disparities Conference found that Black patients were 11% less likely to receive immunotherapy than white patients between 2017 and 2021. Socioeconomic factors such as having Medicare or receiving treatment at a community program rather than a university may have played a large role, the researchers concluded.
More research is needed to understand the true reason for this disparity. And the risks are great. Immunotherapy has rapidly become the standard treatment for this type of cancer since its arrival in 2019. In 2017, only 4.2% of patients with early-stage TNBC received immunotherapy. By 2021, that number had jumped to 48%.
What would happen if you tried to starve a cancer?
MORE CANCER NEWS: Just like you and me, cancer cells need food. But they don’t prefer instant noodles or egg-and-cheese sandwiches. Instead, they love glucose. Previous efforts to block the digestion of the simple sugars that help cancer cells grow have been ineffective. But in a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances, researchers found that reducing one of their favorite foods might mean cancer cells simply find another to eat. In this case, it’s glutamine and lactic acid.
To effectively starve cancer cells, researchers found that they needed to block at least two of these three nutrients. STAT’s Angus Chen spoke with two of the study authors about a potential new treatment that could starve tumors. Read more.
What we’re reading
They rooted for “our boys” in their quest for a cure for Duchenne, but what about the girls?
Doctors ‘fighting tooth and nail’ over Trump’s reelection: ‘The election matters to our health’, Politico writes
New HHS Rules Fail to Address Leading Cause of Research Misconduct, STAT The Power of Small Breasts, New York Times The Human Cost of Ghost Networks, NPR
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