Telehealth, Covid, Oncology, Public Health, and busy Biotech
Happy Thursday! Ryan Fitzgerald and Alexander Bois-Spinelli here with your weekly dose of the biggest stories coming from the STAT news dot com team. It’s been a busy week, so let’s get to it!
Telepharmacies face a shaky future
Online pharmacies have long been viewed as a potential solution for underserved communities without pharmacies of their own. In 2021, 138 counties in the United States had no pharmacy at all, according to the Rural Policy Research Institute, and more are considered pharmacy deserts. But many small-town telepharmacies are now struggling to stay open and companies like CVS and Walgreens are experimenting with systems that allow pharmacists to verify prescriptions remotely.
Covid boosters and Long Covid
The FDA authorized updated Covid-19 boosters for kids as young as 5 this week. Before the announcement, the new version of the shots were available only to adults and kids 12 and older. The FDA's decision more specifically gives the green light for Moderna’s bivalent booster.
Our colleague Usha Lee McFarling published an interview with Wes Ely, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Through a new book, op-eds, and #TikToks, he has become a leading voice on the recovery that can take place after trauma or grueling illness, including #longCovid, and on the importance of preventing new Covid infections. Read the full interview here.
In oncology this week
For decades, gastroenterologists put colonoscopies on a pedestal. But new results from a clinical trial throw confidence in colonoscopy’s dominance into doubt. The trial’s primary analysis found that colonoscopy cut colon cancer risk by roughly one-fifth, below past estimates of the test’s efficacy, and didn’t provide any significant reduction in deaths due to colon cancer. What’s this mean for the future? Angus Chen reports.
The U.S. is about to have two standalone publicly-traded oncology providers, and Tara Bannow can tell you all about it.
Meanwhile, Adam Feuerstein story has a story on biopharmaceutical company Merck paying Moderna $250 million to secure opt-in rights to its personalized vaccine for the treatment of patients with skin cancer.
Maternity care, dietary habits and environmental justice
An estimated 36% of U.S. counties are “maternity care deserts, defined as a county without a hospital or birth center offering obstetric care and without any obstetric providers. Theresa Gaffney reports that, in the midst of a maternal care crisis, the latest report from March of Dimes shows the number of those counties may be increasing.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Does the keto diet work? Does eating red meat increase one’s risk of heart disease or would eating more vegetables help? Depending on which friend, or TikTok nurse, you ask, the answers could be very different. But a new tool uses science to show how much evidence exists to support various diet and lifestyle changes. Here’s a hint from Jeffrey Stanaway, an assistant professor of global health at the University of Washington: “The evidence on vegetables is pretty good.”
STAT's Sarah Owernohle also published a special report this week on the Office of Environmental Justice and its desire to tackle issues like ensuring that the residents of Jackson, Miss. have drinkable water after weeks of risk from a damaged sanitation system or slowing the flow of emissions-related respiratory problems for the people in New York City’s “asthma alley.”
Biotech’s busy week
Merck had an exciting Monday when it announced the key drug from its $11.5 billion purchase of the #biotech Acceleron met its main goal in a key clinical trial. Merck's press release did not disclose detailed results, but said that the medicine, used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension, resulted in a “statistically significant and clinically meaningful” increase in the distance patients could walk in six minutes. Matthew Herper has the full story.
After a large influx of cash from sales of its Covid-19 vaccine, BioNTech has big hopes for the future. CEO Uğur Şahin said “This is the big thing about our company. We will use the chance – this historic chance – to build a global pharmaceutical company. A new generation of the pharmaceutical company with multiple products in the market, with products not only in infectious disease and cancer but also in other disease areas. That is our target for 2030.”
Adam Feuerstein reported disappointing news for Relmada Therapeutics yesterday. Their experimental treatment for depression failed to achieve the primary goals of a large clinical trial, which is a big setback for the company’s only medicine in clinical development.
A company co-founded by venture capital firm Atlas Venture has shut down after running into problems with its lead drug for Huntington's disease and raising new funding. The goal of Triplet Therapies was to develop drugs for what are known as repeat expansion disorders — genetic diseases that are caused when short chunks of the DNA sequence repeat over and over again in the #DNA strand.
Before we send you back into the world, here are a few things that we wanted you to know about STAT:
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— Ryan and Alexander