Hello and good morning! I hope everyone stayed dry and got some good binge watching in. Speaking of which, The New York Times has finally released its full ranking of the top 100 TV shows of the 21st century. A lot of my favorites made the list, including “Fleabag,” “Gilmore Girls,” (for the fall nostalgia) and “House.” Did your favorite shows (medical or otherwise) make the list? What’s missing? And what’s on your mind this week? Reach out!
Are GLP-1s medications or lifestyle drugs? Yes
“Live lighter” and “summer glow up” sound like magazine cover taglines. They are also, it turns out, slogans Novo Nordisk has used to promote its GLP-1s.
STAT’s Elaine Chen has taken note of the way Novo and other companies have reframed their marketing of these important medications. “Once promoted as tools to address obesity as a medical issue, GLP-1 drugs are increasingly being seen — and marketed — as a way to look and feel better generally,” she writes.
Why are they making this shift? Elaine unravels that mystery, weaving together the way insurance companies’ coverage decisions have shaped how these medicines are used. Read more here.
Trump uses ‘contested’ power to cut more funding to HHS
Late Friday night, the Trump administration clawed back nearly $1 billion in spending approved by Congress. It targeted several HHS programs focused on immigrants and diversity, including a study on barriers to primary care among people of color, a project on racism in emergency medicine, and money to improve access to transgender care for youth of color in rural areas.
The administration cancelled the spending using something known as a “pocket rescission,” which the AP described as a “rare and contested power.” The Office of Management and Budget said the cuts focused on “the most harmful government spending.” But in a fiery statement, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), pushed back, calling the rescission another attempt by OMB to “undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse.”
About Claude’s newest scientific ‘breakthrough’ …
Claude discovered the next CRISPR … or did it? Anthropic last week announced that Claude had found a new enzyme system with a series of repeats in DNA, saying that it was “a pattern reminiscent of CRISPR.” CRISPR is the technology that research scientists use in the laboratory to modify the DNA of living organisms. It was adapted from naturally occurring editing systems found in bacteria.
But some experts have been disappointed by the way Anthropic is marketing this discovery. “Finding a weird cluster of genes and repeats is often the easy part,” wrote Lucas Harrington, co-founder of Preventive and Mammoth Biosciences, who earned his Ph.D. in the lab of CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna. “The hard part, and where the real discoveries come from, is figuring out what the system actually does.” Anthropic itself says that it does not yet know what this system’s function is, meaning there’s still a possibility that it’s nothing.
While it is helpful that Anthropic is sharing this early in its discovery process, and the project illustrates how AI might be useful in scientific pursuits, it’s hard not to feel like this is marketing for Claude’s scientific capabilities as Anthropic approaches its long-awaited IPO. Who corrects all these feel-good headlines if, after lab investigations, it turns out to have no value? — Brittany Trang
You can get analyses of AI in health and life sciences in your inbox every Wednesday through Brittany’s AI Prognosis newsletter. Newly available: A shortened version of the newsletter for free STAT readers. Sign up here.
What we know about Trump’s nominee to run the FDA and the abortion pill
At last week’s confirmation hearing, Heidi Overton, the administration’s nominee to head the FDA, wouldn’t say much on abortion, repeatedly declining to answer questions on how she would direct the agency’s safety review of the drug mifepristone, the drug used to end an early pregnancy.
But in a First Opinion, the CEO of Reproductive Futures argues that Overton’s circumspect responses shouldn’t obscure the truth. Overton has a record of questioning mifepristone’s safety, including in a 2023 briefing. In a Fox News interview the head of Americans United for Life said he had spoken with Overton five or six times and predicted that she would “expose this drug.”
“With this latest appointment, mifepristone has a new boss but an old problem,” Julie F. Kay writes. “Few medications have been sued, petitioned against, and unnecessarily hauled before Congress as often as this one has. For the past two decades, the U.S. has probed, cross-examined, and disparaged mifepristone, despite the medication’s well-documented safety. Even under this unprecedented scrutiny, mifepristone’s impressive safety and efficacy record stands strong in the U.S. and globally.” Read more.
50%
That’s the jump in deaths from three common general surgery conditions over a 20-year period. It’s notable because the three ailments — appendicitis, acute cholecystitis, and abdominal wall hernia with obstruction — have low death rates when treated promptly.
But a research team at the OSF Saint Francis Medical Center scoured CDC data from 1999 and 2020 and found the death rate is rising among adults 18 – 64. That’s especially true in rural communities, raising questions about whether patients are reaching the help they need in time.
How to combat AI-fueled biological weapons
This weekend marked 25 years since two batches of anthrax-laden envelopes were mailed from New Jersey to Capitol Hill, sparking panic across the country. Daniel Jernigan worked on the CDC’s follow-up investigation, and writes that the 2001 attacks have lessons for our time.
“Today, the technologies available for detecting biological threats are substantially more capable,” he writes. “But the infrastructure to respond to natural and intentional infectious diseases is vulnerable, due to cuts to multiple civilian and military biodefense programs.” Read more on what needs to change.
And in case that didn’t give you enough to worry about, Ashish Jha warns that AI has made it even harder to keep biological weapons from proliferating. “For decades, biological weapons were rare for a reason: Building them takes expertise that’s hard to acquire and harder to combine,” Jha writes. “AI is closing that gap” by making someone with training in one field more capable. What can governments do? Jha lays out some ideas here.