ARPA-H just launched, but it could be a bumpy ride

Congress has finally funded the agency that President Biden has pledged will help “end cancer as we know it.” But when lawmakers set aside $1 billion for the new agency, to be known as ARPA-H, they paved a chaotic path forward, leaving unresolved where the agency will be located and whether it will exist independently, leaving that decision to health secretary Xavier Becerra. Considering the Biden administration’s long-held stance that ARPA-H should be housed within the NIH, research experts say it’s not much of a decision at all. “It strikes me as a preordained outcome,” Bhaven Sampat of Columbia University told STAT’s Lev Facher, who notes that Congress also stiffed Biden when it comes to funding, providing roughly 15% of what was first requested. Still, the new money represents major progress on one of Biden’s signature science initiatives. Read more in STAT+.

White House begs Congress for Covid funding amid concern about Omicron sister variant

It’s come to this. The White House is begging Congress for more funds to help with Covid-19 surveillance, testing, and treatments — a call that could be bolstered by the emerging signs of an increase in Covid-19 cases in Europe. After lawmakers’ plan to provide $22.5 billion in Covid-19 funding imploded last week over disagreements about how the new spending should be paid for, the White House has been faced with cutting back on its pandemic response activities because its budget is nearly exhausted. It’s unclear whether additional funding is on the way, at a time when an even more transmissible form of the Omicron variant, called BA.2, has been building up in prevalence. Updated CDC data released yesterday showed that BA.2 is now accounting for some 1 in 4 U.S. infections. STAT’s Rachel Cohrs and Andrew Joseph have more.

Mammograms could warn of cardiovascular risk

After routine mammograms, patients may hear they have calcifications in their breasts. Not considered a sign of cancer, the bright white lines snaking through the black-and-white images could offer clues to risk of cardiovascular disease, a new study in Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging suggests. Breast arterial calcification — calcium buildup in the breast’s arterial wall — is different from coronary artery calcification, known for its cardiovascular risk. Among more than 5,000 postmenopausal women followed for six years, those with breast arterial calcification were 51% more likely to develop heart disease or have a stroke than women who didn’t. Scientists say an explanation is “elusive,” and women without this calcification still face cardiovascular risk, the authors note. “We still lack data that presence of BAC is ready for prime time to inform prevention decisions in women,” a companion editorial says, but it could signal poor cardiovascular health.

Closer look: Doctors want a better option than Google Translate to speak with their patients

(molly ferguson for stat)

The patient had just undergone a cesarean section and was struggling to find words for her pain in her native Taiwanese. The doctor making rounds called an interpreter, but it became clear two different dialects were causing confusion. So the doctor turned to a familiar tool: Google Translate. To comply with federal requirements, hospitals must provide meaningful access to language services for their patients. But it can be an imperfect system, so Google Translate has come to serve as a ubiquitous, if under-examined, part of patient care. “It’s sort of [used] under the table,” Elaine Khoong of the University of California, San Francisco, told STAT’s Katie Palmer. There’s a growing push to bring it to the surface — both to study Google Translate’s use and risk in the clinic, and to build better versions to backstop traditional language services.

Crisis model for Covid care could lead to inequity, simulation suggests

In the pandemic’s earliest days, overwhelmed hospitals drew up triage plans they hoped they’d never use. Called crisis standards of care, they stratify patients by how likely they are to survive if given acute care. A study in JAMA Network Open looking at how a six-hospital system in the Boston area categorized nearly 500 critically ill patients took one step further, modeling which patients would receive care. In this simulation based on estimates of short-term (organ failure assessment) and longer-term mortality (comorbidities and survival estimates), Black patients were more likely than white patients to be in the lowest priority. “These findings suggest that a scoring system designed to maximize lives and life-years saved in the setting of resource scarcity during the Covid-19 pandemic may result in racial inequities in prioritization,” the authors write, but a linked editorial says it adds to “a growing yet inconsistent evidence base pertaining to [crisis standards of care] equity.”

In mice, scientists see synthetic HDL cholesterol help treat sepsis

Sepsis is an often fatal complication of infection that has few treatments. All along, scientists studying it have noted a drop in HDL, or “good,” cholesterol circulating in ICU patients who have the inflammatory condition. In healthy people, HDL binds to cholesterol and ferries it to the liver, where it is modified or removed from the body, lowering heart disease risk. New research in Science Signaling, although just in a mouse model of sepsis, suggests that administering synthetic HDL lowers inflammation and elevates survival. The synthetic HDL appears to work by binding to bacterial toxins and tamping down the production of cytokines, known for the inflammation they cause. The researchers acknowledge the limitation of simulating human sepsis in mice, but say their work could one day be translated into a therapy.

On this week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast," First Opinion editor Patrick Skerrett talks with Alina Bills about about having to turn to social media to crowdsource insulin when she unexpectedly ran out. Listen here.

What to read around the web today

Pfizer and BioNTech seek authorization of a second booster shot for older Americans. New York Times
How to time your second booster. The Atlantic
Google, eyeing a broader market for medical software, strikes a deal with major health records player. STAT
U.S. funeral assistance for Covid tops $2B, more eligible. Associated Press
Gilead faces criticism for donations to state senators who backed ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill in Florida. STAT+