Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
A high-level official at Anthropic posted on Tuesday evening that he believes there is a greater than 10% chance that “AI could kill all humans” within the next decade.
While I am not deep enough in the code to comment coherently on our impending extinction, I *am* qualified enough to say: if you want award-winning coverage of the risks (and benefits!) of AI in our current health systems, you should sign up for a STAT subscription.
OK, here’s the news, including three AI-related items.
Oz says ‘AI-based avatars’ can help rural communities. Some leaders disagree
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services head Mehmet Oz and other Trump administration officials are touting artificial intelligence as a game-changing force for rural health. But some rural hospitals are skeptical the tools will close the funding gaps they face from Republicans’ Medicaid cuts, STAT’s Daniel Payne reports in the latest installment of STAT’s Unraveled series.
Rural health care providers have struggled for years and are now staring down $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the coming decade. While there are places where AI could shine — sending nudges on prescriptions or helping providers determine which patients need care and when — rural health leaders worry that investing in AI will only exacerbate existing inequalities between urban and rural communities.
AI tools perform well with clear determinations from large data sources. It may struggle with more subjective calls, such as which patients qualify for “medical frailty” exemptions, could be harder.
Daniel talked with dozens of health officials and trekked to Maine and Louisiana for this eye-opening story. Read more.
Feds invest $62 million to develop AI for heart failure treatment
Are “autonomous prescribing cardiologists” coming to a clinic near you?
ARPA-H, the government agency that funds cutting-edge health research, plans to commit $62.7 million to develop artificial intelligence bots that direct treatment of heart failure. The program aims to produce AI devices that can perform several functions, including assessing symptom severity, prescribing drugs, and ordering lab tests.
Federal officials hope that these AI agents will help many of the 6.7 million Americans with heart failure, who often struggle to get optimal treatment because of difficulty accessing specialists, especially in rural and other underserved settings. It’s the latest example of the Trump administration trying to use AI to solve health care problems.
STAT’s Mario Aguilar breaks down the new program (ADVOCATE) and dishes the details on the initial health tech companies and teams that were awarded grants.
It’s not just U.S. health officials …
… that are discussing how to use AI tools for medicine.
A U.K. commission on Thursday unveiled recommendations for how the country should regulate artificial intelligence in medicine, the latest country to try to get a handle on a quickly changing technological landscape.
The authors write that they want to ensure that the U.K. takes advantage of AI’s potential in medicine — the ability to review the millions of scans that are generated each year to track the eye health of patients with diabetes, for example — while still prioritizing safety and treating patients equitably.
The report details 44 recommendations, including some that call for a staged authorization of new AI models and others that would build a system for providers to report how tools are performing in their clinics.
Read more about the report from STAT’s Andrew Joseph.
The vaccine election
Vaccine policy has become a central issue ahead of the November midterm elections as the White House pushes states to revamp their immunization policies and state-level Republican politicians campaign on ending school vaccine requirements.
The majority of states have already departed from national, unified vaccine guidance set by the federal government and are pursuing their own rules. But the midterms could have major consequences for whom the public looks toward for guidance on which shots they and their children should get.
To understand this emerging patchwork of vaccine policy, STAT’s Chelsea Cirruzzo looks at five races in November. What’s the situation in states like Florida, Arizona, and Iowa? What has Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, said about federal officials’ approach to vaccine policy? Read more.
To sleep, no more
Two scientists who identified the role that a key neuropeptide plays in the uncontrollable sleepiness of narcolepsy were one of three recipients of the prestigious Lasker Awards, announced Thursday.
Starting in the late 1990s, Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa began research that separately arrived at the same conclusion: that orexin, a neuropeptide, was critical to narcolepsy. These findings laid the foundation for the development of new sleep drugs that biotech companies are racing to bring to market in their bid to capture a $5 billion market. Read Elaine Chen’s excellent story from last year if you want the skinny on these drugs, and then read her recent update about the company whose narcolepsy drug just gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Two other groups received Lasker Awards, which are often precursors for Nobel Prizes. A team of Japanese scientists won for their development of treatment for hemophilia A. Michael J. Fox won an award for his philanthropy and advocacy for Parkinson’s disease research.
What we’re reading
- ‘No future’ parenting, The Cut
- One school district’s fight against Trump’s anti-transgender push, the New York Times
- Coroner releases details of infants who died amid growing Pennsylvania measles outbreak, STAT
- Challenge to abortion drug heads back to court ahead of midterm elections, the Washington Sun