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Hello, I’m Amanda Erickson! For the past year, I’ve been editing Morning Rounds. Now, I’ll be writing the newsletter twice a week, on Mondays and Tuesdays. I’m very excited to share the latest health and science news. I’m also eager to hear from you: tell me what you like about the newsletter, what’s not working, and what you want to see more of. (If you have any favorite medicine memoirs, send those over as well! I’m still working on my fall reading list.)

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Vera Therapeutics said Tuesday that its recently approved drug Trutakna stabilized kidney function and reduced the risk of kidney-related death and other complications in patients with a chronic autoimmune kidney disease, according to final, two-year results from a Phase 3 clinical trial. 

In July, the Food and Drug Administration granted accelerated approval to Trutakna for the treatment of IgA nephropathy, or IgAN, a disease caused by the buildup of immune antibodies in the kidneys. The condition leads to progressive loss of kidney function and potentially organ failure requiring dialysis.

With the final data from the study in hand, Vera said it will seek full approval of the drug from the FDA during the fourth quarter. 

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Spaceflight is a risky business. Keeping astronauts healthy, especially their hearts, has driven Benjamin Levine’s career as a top consulting cardiologist to NASA. Now that a Mars mission is on the horizon, his most recent research continues to test how well exercise maintains the heart’s structure and function during prolonged spaceflight.  

In their paper published Tuesday in Circulation, an international team reports results from 13 astronauts who performed onboard echocardiograms during their six months in space. That imaging showed mild but transient changes in the heart when moving from Earth gravity to microgravity, revealing how long-duration spaceflight affects cardiac size and function, and what happens when landing on Earth and in simulations of Martian gravity. 

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The rollout of a Medicare program that uses artificial intelligence to approve or deny care was hasty and error-ridden, according to more than a thousand pages of recently released documents and data.

The pilot program, called the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction model, or WISeR, launched in January and requires health care providers to seek approvals before they can provide certain procedures and products, like skin substitutes and epidural injections for pain management. The experiment operates in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Washington and will run until 2031. 

Among other issues, the documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that one WISeR vendor warned the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that it was unrealistic to expect a working product by the time the federal agency wanted to launch the program. 

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When I became the first executive director of the country’s oldest statewide tobacco control coalition in 1999, conversations were already underway about how Colorado should spend its share of funds distributed to states from the landmark tobacco settlement.

Unsurprisingly, interest groups from across our state came forward to argue why their priorities deserved a portion of Colorado’s share of settlement dollars. While policymakers considered how to spend the state’s portion of the settlement, my job was to go to communities across Colorado and explain why a significant portion of the funds should go to tobacco prevention and education programs, rather than unrelated, even if deserving, programs.

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The health insurance deduction is one of the quieter numbers on a paystub, but next year, it could hit paychecks harder than inflation or taxes. 

Over 165 million Americans rely on employer-sponsored healthcare coverage, but it’s getting more expensive for employers to foot the bill. 

Mercer, a global consulting firm specializing in health benefits, projects healthcare costs per employee will jump 8.2% in 2027, the steepest increase since 2003 and the fifth consecutive year of elevated costs, according to a survey of 1,800 U.S. employers. But the number on employers’ books isn’t what workers will feel: Two-thirds of companies with 500 or more employees plan to raise premiums, meaning paycheck deductions will climb even faster than that 8.2% average. It’s coming out of your pay, in all likelihood.

“The reality is this does eat into money that could be invested in wages,” Nick Stefanizzi, CEO of Northwell Direct, which provides health benefits to self-insured employers, told Fortune. 

Health insurance makes up almost a quarter of the benefits employers pay workers per hour. Private employers pay about $3.48 on average for employees’ health insurance per hour the employee works, according to June Bureau of Labor Statistics data, out of the $14.07 per hour spent on benefits. 

Several factors, both old and new, are driving the 8.2% increase. Mercer pointed to hospital consolidation and less government spending on healthcare as the structural forces keeping healthcare costs above inflation but noted expensive new cancer treatments, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, and AI-enabled medical billing are also pushing up costs. Mercer’s chief actuary Sunit Patel estimated GLP-1 use alone accounted for one percentage point of the total increase in health cost growth for 2027.     

Impact on workers’ wallets

Higher health insurance costs for employers turn into out-of-pocket costs for their employees in several ways. They can hike up employees’ share of premiums, the fixed and recurring fees paid to the plan provider that’s split between the employer and employee. Workers with family coverage contributed an average of about $6,850 toward premiums last year. 

But premiums aren’t the only way employees see health insurance eat their paychecks. Employers can also raise deductibles (the price upfront before coverage starts) and copays (the flat fee before a visit). Almost half of the companies employing 500 or more people surveyed by Mercer said they’ll make changes to existing medical plans that will translate into those higher costs for their employees next year. 

“They’re going to absorb some portion of it at the employer level, and then they’re going to push the rest to the employee,” Brandy Thompson, CEO of benefits technology company BenefitBay, told Fortune. “We have an increase in out-of-pocket costs that are going to hit the employee, and both of those things are not sustainable in the current inflation market that we are already experiencing.” 

There’s also another, less perceptible way higher healthcare costs erode take-home pay.  Economists have found higher healthcare premiums can translate into smaller wages because health insurance is part of workers’ total compensation.

“Employers have a certain amount they can spend on each employee, and that includes salary, healthcare, and other benefits,” Navin Nagiah, CEO of healthcare technology company Daffodil Health, told Fortune.“If healthcare takes up a bigger piece of that pie every year, there is less money left for everything else.”

The Congressional Budget Office includes health insurance as part of its reports on household income because it considers employers’ contributions to healthcare as a “substitute to cash wages” that boosts households’ economic resources. Driven by growing employer health insurance contributions, salaries decreased from 91% of total worker compensation in 1960 to an average of 82% in the past decade, according to CBO’s analysis. CBO projects the cost of health insurance will slightly outpace wages in the next 30 years. 

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For years, long COVID has been defined almost entirely by what patients report feeling: fatigue, brain fog, memory lapses, a loss of motivation that won’t lift. Doctors have struggled to treat a symptom with no clear physical marker, and the condition has reshaped workplaces as employers scramble to accommodate it. But despite the shared symptoms, there’s been little for doctors to point to and say, “this is what changed in your body.”

Now, a new study from researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the University of Toronto may start to change that. Led by Jeffrey Meyer, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto, researchers used PET imaging to measure a protein called VMAT2, found on the nerve terminals that release dopamine, in 24 long COVID patients and 24 healthy people who’d had only mild or moderate initial infections.

The study found patients with long COVID had significantly lower VMAT2 levels across the brain region tied to motivation, movement, and memory (the striatum). The reduction ranged from 16% in the region tied to planning (dorsal putamen) to 20% in the region most closely tied to motivation and apathy (ventral striatum).

“By showing that there’s reductions in the nerves that release dopamine in these areas, and then showing the relationship of them to the symptoms, that’s two pieces of information that makes a strong connection to long COVID,” Meyer told Fortune.

This builds on a 2023 study from his team, which found elevated inflammation in these same brain regions. That study measured a different protein, one found on inflammatory cells. “They’re measuring fundamentally different processes, but it may be that one is leading to the other,” he explained. Inflammatory cells can damage the ends of dopamine-releasing nerves, or injury to the nerves themselves could be generating the inflammation.

What sets the new study apart, Meyer said, is how closely the imaging results tracked with specific symptoms. Reduced dopamine markers in the region associated with apathy (ventral striatum) lined up with memory problems. Markers in the planning region (dorsal putamen) tracked with slowed movement. A third region tracked with loss of motivation.

Finally, a biological marker

Long COVID has long been criticized for lacking any objective marker that doctors could point to, leaving patients with a diagnosis built almost entirely on self-reported symptoms.

“Because we’ve now pinpointed a change that indicates loss of dopamine nerve terminals, and that it relates to symptoms,” Meyer said. “Having that information puts us in a position to do a lot more studies that are targeted in this area, and hopefully develop new cures that aren’t going to be that far away.”

He added: “The definite strength of the study is the strong relationship to important symptoms, and it’s also a clear interpretation that this marker is low in people who have these symptoms.”

The dopamine loss is different from ordinary dips in mood or motivation, Meyer said. It reflects an actual reduction in the density of nerve terminals, not simply lower dopamine output from nerves that remain intact. Whether that’s reversible is still unclear. Meyer said some patients may recover as damaged nerve terminals regrow or sprout new connections, particularly with exercise or activities that engage the affected brain regions. For others, ongoing inflammation may be blocking that recovery entirely, meaning they would need a targeted treatment rather than time alone.

That treatment is already taking shape. Meyer’s team is preparing a clinical trial that would repurpose an existing dopamine-related medication, one his group has already shown crosses into the brain. “A couple of people have had positive responses to it that have been quite striking,” he said. The team wants to move forward with a full trial, but a grant proposal for the trial has narrowly missed two funding rounds in a row, according to Meyer.

Some people will recover through effort and adaptation, while others will need medical intervention to get there. “Some people will get a lot of improvement,” Meyer said, “but it might be that we need these kinds of treatments to get a full cure.”

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The projected savings from a highly touted Trump administration plan to lower Medicare drug costs may be drastically reduced — by as much as 80% — thanks to secretive deals cut with more than two dozen pharmaceutical companies, according to a new analysis.

At issue is an approach known as “most-favored nation” pricing, which would tie the prices paid by Medicare to what 19 other wealthy nations pay for the same medicines. The White House has maintained the effort would save Medicare $26 billion over several years and help mitigate the long-standing problem of increasingly unaffordable prescription drugs.

To make this happen, the administration is creating two pilot programs — GLOBE for Medicare Part B and GUARD for Medicare Part D — that will require drug companies to pay additional rebates if their prices exceed the lowest international price found in those 19 countries. More specific details about the rules are due shortly.

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As presidents of two private foundations focused on the ethical dimensions of science, we attend many meetings where we hear concerns about declining public trust in science. Often, someone in the room will suggest that the solution to this problem is to “communicate better.” Others will lament that the problem is simply too big for us to solve. The chasm between those responses is telling.

We began to wonder whether scientists and the public have a shared understanding of what is meant by “trust” and its decline, what can be done to build it, and whether better messaging really is the magic answer.

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It’ll be the company formerly known as Novo Nordisk. 

The Danish firm, whose diabetes and obesity drugs have become household names, said Monday it would embrace “Novo” as its new brand, part of a culture shifts that aims to signal the company will “move ahead with greater focus, speed, and impact.” 

The rebrand, featuring the slogan “Lasting Health Starts Now,” is part of Novo’s turnaround attempt. The company, which was first out of the gate in the modern GLP-1 era, has since fallen behind Eli Lilly in the obesity market and underwhelmed investors with its pipeline. Shares are down nearly 20% over the past year, part of a broader collapse in the company’s stock since its peak in 2024, when it was Europe’s most valuable company.  

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Definium Therapeutics said Monday that its LSD therapy helped patients with anxiety in a second late-stage trial, setting up the company to seek the first approval of a psychedelic drug for anxiety.

In the 12-week trial, patients taking a 100-microgram dose of the drug, called DT120, experienced a 9.8-point drop on a test called the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, while those on placebo experienced a 4.7-point drop. The difference of 5.1 points is similar to what was seen in Definium’s first late-stage anxiety study and larger than what’s been observed with many other anxiety therapies, though it’s difficult to compare results across studies.

Definium is among the first wave of biotechs nearing regulatory approval for psychedelic therapies, a class of treatments that may be especially attractive to patients since they appear to exert rapid benefits. (In the latest trial, Definium said patients experienced changes as early as the second day after dosing.) In contrast, the effects of traditional options like antidepressants take weeks to kick in.

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Happy Monday, all. Helen Branswell here. I’ve been with STAT since its launch in 2015. In fact, the 11th anniversary of the day I started was last week. But in all these years, I’ve never before written an entire newsletter. So please bear with me. 

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Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another working week. We hope the weekend respite was relaxing and invigorating. Now, though, that oh-too-familiar routine of meetings, deadlines, and the like has returned with a vengeance. You knew this would happen, yes? To cope, we are relying, as always, on a cuppa stimulation. Our choice today is blueberry hibiscus. Feel free to join us. Remember, no prescription or prior authorization is required. Meanwhile, here are a few items of interest. Best of luck accomplishing your goals, and we hope you conquer the world. And, of course, do keep in touch. …

AstraZeneca disclosed that a breast cancer pill failed in a pivotal trial testing it as a first-line therapy in advanced tumors, a result that could limit the use of the medicine, STAT notes. The drug, camizestrant, in combination with another medicine did not outperform standard treatment on a measure of how long patients went before their cancer progressed. The drug earlier this month won accelerated approval in the U.S. as a treatment for patients who develop a mutation in their tumors that’s a sign of emerging drug resistance. Had the trial been successful, it could have opened up a much larger market for the drug. 

Scholar Rock received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the first-ever therapy that targets the loss of muscle in spinal muscle atrophy, raising hopes that patients with the rare neurological disorder might have a better chance of moving and walking independently, STAT writes. The FDA approved the drug, Isembyld, for use in adults and children 2 years and older who are currently receiving SMA therapies that target SMN2, a key gene for neurons that control movement. The approval marks another step forward for patients with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare and progressive disease that destroys nerve cells that control speaking, breathing, and walking. Babies who go untreated usually die by the age of 2.

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Definium’s LSD therapy has a strong performacne in a pivotal anxiety trial, drugmaker deals could gut “most-favored nation” Medicare savings, and more.

In this endless heat wave my house is now overrun with flies and I think I give up and will also become a fly. They win.

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There are two types of people: Those who have played RollerCoaster Tycoon, and those who haven’t. Nothing slaps like the original, but the upcoming reboot looks kinda cool. Send me your roller coaster designs, or just say hi: bob.herman@statnews.com.

Trump’s health policy: cash

President Trump’s decision to funnel $500 checks to a specific subgroup of people with Affordable Care Act plans, right before the midterms, isn’t just another political quid pro quo. It captures the one loose health policy Republicans cling to: Let cash fix everything.

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WASHINGTON — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will give a keynote address at a Children’s Health Defense conference in the nation’s capital this week, embracing the anti-vaccine organization he once led.

“We couldn’t be more excited to welcome our founder back to the CHD stage,” the nonprofit said in an email announcing Kennedy as a speaker. 

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Abbott Laboratories will pay $385 million to resolve claims tied to an investigation of contamination at a baby formula factory in Sturgis, Michigan, the largest in the country, which led to the supply shortages in 2022.

Problems at the facility prompted a lawsuit by the Justice Department and recall of powdered infant formula at the facility.

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A federal judge on Monday issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from upending a long-standing policy that allows foreign students and scholars to stay in the U.S. for the duration of their training, a decision that suggests that plaintiffs opposed to the policy change are likely to ultimately succeed.

The ruling halts plans by the Department of Homeland Security to place a four-year cap on the kinds of visas used by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers while a judge hears full arguments in a lawsuit over the new policy. Experts warn the outcome of the case could have a dramatic impact on the nation’s biomedical preeminence given that international researchers make up a large share of the U.S. life science workforce. The new policy had been set to take effect on Tuesday. 

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The layoffs come months after CommonSpirit announced it was ending its service contract early and exiting its stake in the Tenet-owned revenue cycle company.

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LONDON — AstraZeneca said Friday that a breast cancer pill failed in a pivotal trial testing it as a first-line therapy in advanced tumors, a result that could limit the use of the medicine.

The drug, camizestrant, in combination with another medicine did not outperform standard treatment on a measure of how long patients went before their cancer progressed. The SERENA-4 trial enrolled patients with ER-positive, HER2-negative advanced cancer who hadn’t had another systemic therapy for advanced disease.

Camizestrant earlier this month won accelerated approval in the U.S. as Etcamah as a treatment for patients who develop a mutation in their tumors that’s a sign of emerging drug resistance. The SERENA-4 trial, had it been successful, could have opened up a much larger market for the drug. 

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Scholar Rock on Friday received Food and Drug Administration approval for the first-ever therapy that targets the loss of muscle in spinal muscle atrophy, raising hopes that patients with the rare neurological disorder might have a better chance of moving and walking independently.

The FDA approved the drug, Isembyld, for use in adults and children 2 years and older who are currently receiving SMA therapies that target SMN2, a key gene for neurons that control movement. A late-stage clinical trial found that, when combined with an SMN2-targeting drug, Isembyld caused young patients’ motor skills to improve after a year, while those in a placebo group declined, a difference that was statistically significant.

“Today’s FDA approval of Isembyld marks a defining moment for the SMA community,” said David Hallal, CEO of Scholar Rock, in a press release. “After decades of failed industry-wide efforts to unlock the potential of myostatin inhibition, Scholar Rock has delivered a therapeutic breakthrough.”

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In a boost for the pharmaceutical industry, a European Union Advocate General recommended annulling part of a directive that requires drug and cosmetics manufacturers to finance at least 80% of the costs of wastewater treatment.

The directive, which revised an earlier version and went into effect early last year, was designed to protect human health and the environment from harmful discharges of urban wastewater and ensure cleaner rivers, lakes, groundwater, and coasts across Europe. The effort was projected to save about $7.5 billion annually by 2040.

A key portion of the initiative is a “quaternary treatment stage” that involves removing micropollutants — which are mostly created by pharmaceuticals and cosmetics — from wastewater. Member states must ensure that companies contribute to programs to deal with the waste they generate by December 2028.

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WASHINGTON — The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services this week released guidance for states allowing them to use a “tier system” to determine which Medicaid recipients are too ill to work or volunteer at least 20 hours per week.

The decision, discussed internally with state Medicaid leaders in recent days, was made public via a document earlier this week. It came as a small relief to patient advocacy groups and some medical associations that had criticized “medical frailty” exemptions as confusing and potentially burdensome for patients and medical providers. 

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WASHINGTON — The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services this week released guidance for states allowing them to use a “tier system” to determine which Medicaid recipients are too ill to work or volunteer at least 20 hours per week.

The decision, discussed internally with state Medicaid leaders in recent days, was made public via a document earlier this week. It came as a small relief to patient advocacy groups and some medical associations that had criticized “medical frailty” exemptions as confusing and potentially burdensome for patients and medical providers. 

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And so, another working week will soon come to a close. Not a moment too soon, yes? This is, you may recall, our treasured signal to daydream about weekend plans. Our agenda is rather low key as we devote much of the time to observing ancient rituals, but also spend a few moments with a family member or two. As usual, though, we will promenade the official mascots and squeeze in an end-of-weekend listening party, where the rotation will likely include this, this, this, this, and this. And what about you? This remains a fine time to enjoy the great outdoors or, if the weather fails to cooperate, you could take in a moving picture show, stop by a favorite eatery, or browse the aisles of a temple of consumption and stock up on winter gear. Or simply plan the rest of your life, before AI does it for you. Well, whatever you do, have a grand time. But be safe. Enjoy, and see you soon. …

Novartis investors are set to step up scrutiny of the company’s dealmaking strategy after setbacks to drugs it acquired through mergers and acquisitions hit ​its shares, raising concerns about its pipeline, Reuters tells us. Eight shareholders said that the failure of a muscle-wasting disorder drug, called del-desiran, in a late-stage study, the second major trial setback ‌for Novartis in days, raised questions over last year’s $12 billion Avidity purchase and other acquisitions. Novartis shares slumped 11% in one day this week, wiping nearly $30 billion off its market value and all the gains made since the start of the year after the del-desiran results.

Ninety percent of the expensive, widely used biologics facing patent expiration by 2034 have no lower-cost alternatives in development, The Wall Street Journal writes, citing a report by the Association for Accessible Medicines, a trade group representing generic drugmakers. This means Americans could miss out on nearly $200 billion in health care savings over the next decade with 118 popular biologic drugs going off patent, according to the association’s estimates. These drugs are highly complex medicines manufactured inside living cells and often end up being multibillion-dollar blockbusters for drug companies. Market uptake for newly launched biosimilars has suffered a steep decline in recent years, dimming excitement among drugmakers about developing them.

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Today: Cancer centers are grappling with persistent drug shortages, drug reps remain surprisingly entrenched in medical practice, and researchers find that platinum chemotherapy can leave lasting genetic scars in children.

It’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Surreal and solemn feelings come to mind.

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Good morning. Chelsea Cirruzzo here. Today we remember 25 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While I was too young to have many recollections of the attack, I did grow up in New York and vividly remember the impact it had on the people around me. So, I always take the time each year to reflect.

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A flurry of artificial intelligence algorithms have promised to help identify heart conditions early. By analyzing an electrocardiogram, a common 10-second test of the heart’s activity, AI has been cleared to screen for common arrhythmias and structural heart conditions, and algorithms in development aim to pinpoint patients at highest risk of sudden cardiac arrest. 

While many of those models are focused on early diagnosis and prevention, AI also might help a patient when they’re having a heart attack. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration issued a rare de novo classification to a model from Powerful Medical that aims to help triage patients to the right care when they’re having chest pain. The vast majority of AI devices go to market through the FDA’s 510(k) clearance pathway; fewer than 10 each year receive de novo classification, which typically requires more clinical evidence. 

The most severe kind of heart attack occurs when a coronary artery, which supplies blood to the heart, is completely blocked off. Those patients need to get to a cardiac catheterization lab as soon as possible to open up the blockage and restore oxygen to the heart. On an EKG, doctors can identify these kinds of myocardial infarctions from their characteristic “ST-segment elevations.” 

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The back-to-back failures of cardiovascular drugs from Novartis and Novo Nordisk made headlines earlier this month. They could also have a chilling effect across the industry. 

Just before Labor Day, Novartis reported that its cardiac therapy, pelacarsen, failed in a widely watched, seven-year clinical trial. The drug was designed to reduce the rates of heart attack or stroke by lowering lipoprotein a, or Lp(a), a type of lipid that, at elevated concentrations, increases the likelihood of severe heart problems. An estimated 20% of people have abnormally high levels. 

Novartis’ drug was the first stab at a new type of cardiovascular treatment, which multiple other drug companies are also pursuing, investing billions of dollars in their own Lp(a) medications. 

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Retired New York City police officer John Aris sat in my office recently waiting for the results of his latest CT scan.

Seven years earlier, I had removed part of his right lung because of cancer. Since then, every follow-up appointment has carried the same anxiety. Before I had even closed the examination room door behind me, I offered the words he had hoped to hear: “No cancer.”

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The Trump administration is promising to send $500 refund checks to nearly 1 million people with Affordable Care Act health plans. The checks will be mailed out starting next month, just before the midterm elections, to many individuals living in swing states. 

The checks will only go to people who don’t receive federal subsidies for their insurance plans, leaving out tens of millions of other people with ACA coverage.

The White House said the money will help “Americans most exposed to the higher costs imposed by the Biden administration’s gross mismanagement of Obamacare.” But the payments instead reflect the Trump administration’s decisions to cut funding to help people enroll in ACA plans, as well as Republicans’ decisions not to extend extra ACA subsidies that expired this year. 

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The Trump administration is promising to send $500 refund checks to nearly 1 million people with Affordable Care Act health plans. The checks will be mailed out starting next month, just before the midterm elections, to many individuals living in swing states. 

The checks will only go to people who don’t receive federal subsidies for their insurance plans, leaving out tens of millions of other people with ACA coverage.

The White House said the money will help “Americans most exposed to the higher costs imposed by the Biden administration’s gross mismanagement of Obamacare.” But the payments instead reflect the Trump administration’s decisions to cut funding to help people enroll in ACA plans, as well as Republicans’ decisions not to extend extra ACA subsidies that expired this year. 

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Platinum-based chemotherapy — in particular cisplatin and carboplatin — are a lifeline for children with certain cancers. These treatments, for instance, transformed the prognosis of hepatoblastoma, a rare cancer of the liver that is the most commonly diagnosed in childhood, from a five-year survival rate of 20% to more than 80% for localized tumors. 

However, these medications work by damaging the DNA of cancer cells, and they are also known to cause mutations in the DNA of healthy cells, potentially raising the risk of new cancers later in life. The mutations have been documented in adults, but the picture is less clear when it comes to children. A new study published Thursday in Science sought a clearer understanding of the long-term impact of platinum agents in children treated for hepatoblastoma. 

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For years, drugmakers have offered free meals, samples, gifts, and speaking fees to physicians, a widely studied issue due to concerns such largesse may unduly influence prescribing habits.

But to what extent have interactions between doctors and pharmaceutical representatives changed behaviors over time?

A new analysis attempts to provide some answers. A group of researchers surveyed 283 physicians who were among more than 1,300 medical students and residents queried in 2011. They compared the responses to an updated effort that was undertaken two years ago, and the results suggest the topic is likely to remain contentious.

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On this week’s episode of “The Readout LOUD”: The pharma industry invested billions of dollars to develop drugs heralded as the next era in the treatment of heart disease — but why did they fail? And what does this mean for the development of new heart medicines moving forward?

Cardiologist and biotech entrepreneur Ethan Weiss joins us to discuss the surprising failures and long-term implications of two large clinical trials involving drugs developed from Novo Nordisk and Novartis, respectively.

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Health Catalyst has cycled through three CEOs in eight months. The data analytics company is betting its newest chief can navigate an AI pivot and revenue headwinds.

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