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Good morning. After the news about Moderna and Merck’s mRNA cancer vaccine came out yesterday, someone resurfaced a great Sharon Begley story on personalized cancer vaccines from early 2016. I recommend reading it if you’re interested in a primer on “turning your cancer against itself.”
Major cancer group cancels alcohol fundraiser
The American Cancer Society has canceled its upcoming Wine and Spirits Industry’s Gala, a spokesperson confirmed to STAT’s Isabella Cueto. The news came less than two months after Isa and our colleague Lev Facher reported that the group had for years raked in at least $22 million from wine and liquor executives, creating at times an unsettling conflict of interest given alcohol’s known links to cancer.
“Can you imagine the American Cancer Society hosting a tobacco industry gala? This is basically the same thing,” said public health professor Michael Siegel, who called the decision to cancel the gala a wise one. Read more from Isa.
Who is Heidi Overton?
While health secretary Robert F. Kenendy Jr. has been the public face of the MAHA movement and the Trump administration’s health care efforts, Heidi Overton has been the top policymaker behind the scenes, STAT’s Chelsea Cirruzzo and Daniel Payne report. Now, President Trump has nominated Overton to run the nation’s food and drug agency.
Overton has spent years as a Trump loyalist, having served in the first administration. Some industry leaders are worried about her close association with former director Marty Makary and the White House. On the other side, many MAHA activists are convinced Overton is to blame for stalled and slow-moving policy initiatives. So how might Overton fare at the FDA? Read more.
When hospital chatbots actually come in handy
Modern electronic health records are bloated. As health systems started experimenting with generative AI tools, the idea was that the technology could be used to find a needle in a haystack — the key piece of information, hidden in pages of records, that could explain a clinical mystery and potentially save a patient’s life. Today, a number of health systems are moving toward broad implementation of chatbots for EHRs. But as STAT’s Katie Palmer reports, it turns out that solving diagnostic mysteries is the least of their selling points.
The dominant application of AI chart summarization tools is decidedly less cinematic: Doctors are using them to save time as they prepare to see patients. Still, questions remain about how many errors are worth accepting in the name of efficiency, and ideally, the rare needle-in-a-haystack discovery. Read more from Katie on where things stand.
Inside a 5-year-old brain organoid
For years, scientists at Harvard rented space to the longest-living brain organoids on record. But they rarely actually studied them, as the longevity became an intimidation. “What if you make a mistake and the experiment doesn’t work and all of a sudden you cannot go back to a sample that is so unique?” Paola Arlotta, a developmental biologist in the lab, told STAT’s Megan Molteni.
Eventually, one junior scientist had the courage to analyze the specimens. A study published yesterday in Nature details what the team found. Over more than five years, the organoids had developed and matured in the same way that our own human brains do. Read more from Megan on the science and how it could be used.
Contrasting legal decisions on gender-affirming care
Last week, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of the Justice Department’s efforts to obtain gender-affirming care patient records from the telehealth company QueerDoc. While most judges have categorized such requests as overreaching or for an improper purpose, two out of three judges on the panel ruled that there was nothing out of line about the QueerDoc request. (Some legal experts believe that the case could be a candidate for en banc review, meaning the entire court would review the case again.)
The QueerDoc case was the first of many quashed requests to be appealed by federal law enforcement. But since oral arguments were made in March, the DOJ has taken a different approach to other subpoenas, concentrating its efforts in a Texas district court with a strong conservative reputation. At least one subsequent criminal subpoena, for records from NYU, has been temporarily blocked by a New York federal court.
Most recently, transgender patients and advocates logged a victory in court, as a district court struck down a Trump administration rule that attempted to exclude gender-affirming care from the “essential health benefits” that Affordable Care Act marketplace plans are required to cover. While only a handful of states explicitly include transgender health care in their list of essential benefits, the care is often covered as part of another protected category, like prescription drugs. The judges ruled that the administration did not use proper procedure to propose the change — an argument that probably won’t work against a similar rule barring Medicaid from covering the services.
What we’re reading
- The case for chilling out about birth rates, Atlantic
- Reduce protein to increase longevity? Nutrition experts say that’s a bad idea, STAT
- Medicare’s paying less for cataract surgery. Eye doctors are turning to lucrative lasers, KFF Health News
- New CDC director tells staff she is prepared to speak ‘truth to power,’ STAT