‘Testing bottleneck’ risks wider monkeypox outbreak, experts warn

The current U.S. system to test people for monkeypox is creating a bottleneck and wasting time needed to control the outbreak, health experts told STAT’s Helen Branswell and Andrew Joseph. We first heard in mid-May about monkeypox cases in multiple countries outside African nations where it is endemic. Since then, 31 cases have been confirmed in the U.S., but that number is likely an undercount slowed by a two-step process requiring specimens be sent to one of 74 labs before reaching the CDC.

“Every single day that we’re not fixing the testing bottleneck, every single day that we’re not getting on top of getting the information out to the networks that need to be aware of this, is time that we are losing in terms of that window closing on containment,” said Boghuma Titanji, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at Emory University. Read more.

Many Black cancer patients aren't asked to join clinical trials, survey finds

You’ve read here and elsewhere about the failure of clinical trials to enroll participants that reflect the racial diversity of the real world. Now STAT’s Angus Chen brings us a study led by a registered nurse and patient advocate with metastatic breast cancer who is Black and who was never offered the option of participating in a trial. In a study she presented at the ASCO meeting yesterday, Stephanie Walker found that most Black women with metastatic breast cancer don’t get enrolled into clinical trials.

Only 40% of Black respondents said they were even offered a chance to be in a trial. “But over 80% would consider joining a trial if they had known about one,” Walker said. “Nobody comes to talk to us about clinical trials.” Read more.

A new coalition aims to license cancer medicines to lower-income countries

There’s a long history of public health officials and patient advocacy groups pushing the pharmaceutical industry to widen access to medicines for lower-income countries. A new initiative has set the same goal for cancer treatments. Melissa Rendler-Garcia of the Union for International Cancer Control spoke with STAT’s Ed Silverman about the new initiative.

Tell us about the new coalition.
We want to find a way for countries to gain access to essential meds, particularly generics. But it’s not just about the price of the medicines. You can offer a drug for $1, but in the end, there are other barriers: training, education, and diagnostics.

What’s special about licensing cancer medicine?
There are very different challenges than with infectious disease. It’s not just about negotiating voluntary licenses, but ensuring you have people in place to work with governments and companies.

Read the full interview here.

Closer look: What health tech pilots that stalled can teach us

(hyacinth empinado/STAT)

Alexa by a hospital patient’s bedside may sound like a great way to ask for ice chips, say, but patients in a test run were creeped out by the voice assistant. Ditto for nurses who were being monitored for hand-washing by an AI camera-based computer system. These are health tech ideas that didn’t make it past the pilot stage. STAT’s Mohana Ravindranath brings us other stories of ideas that never made it to prime time for a variety of reasons, including legitimate concerns about disrupting patient care or adding provider headaches.

The hospital executives she spoke to wouldn’t name names, which is too bad, Tom Cassels, president of venture fund Rock Health, said, calling it a missed opportunity to gain insights, but there are still lessons to be learned from unnamed devices and software that won’t see the light of day. Read more.

Covid deaths track with partisan divide, study says

You can argue — and authors of this Health Affairs study do — about what went wrong early in the flatfooted U.S. pandemic response, from underfunded public health departments to a lack of testing to a federal government with little appetite for mandates. The authors of the observational study then relate Covid deaths to partisan politics. Through October 2021, 72.94 more Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 people were recorded in Republican counties (where 70% or more of votes were cast for Trump in 2020) than in Democratic counties.

Deaths in Republican counties began to outnumber those in Democratic counties in November 2020, with a winter surge and the advent of vaccines, which made up roughly 10% of that difference. The authors factored in demographics, health care availability, and health status before concluding that partisanship explains the different death rates. "Our findings suggest that county-level voting behavior may act as a proxy for compliance with and support of public health measures that would protect residents from Covid-19," they write.

Opinion: It's time to move past Aduhelm

Last week we told you about a study in mice that poked holes in amyloid as the sole explanation and treatment target for Alzheimer’s drugs. Writing in a STAT First Opinion, neuroscientist and geriatrician Howard Fillit asks, “If Aduhelm and other anti-amyloid antibodies that follow it are, at best, just one incremental piece of the puzzle, how do the blanks get filled in?” He offers an update on the pipeline for treatments that don’t rely on accumulations of the sticky protein, noting that more than three in four treatments now in clinical development work against non-amyloid targets.

The experimental drugs are aimed at reducing inflammation in the brain, improving blood flow, clearing misfolded proteins, and bettering how the brain metabolizes energy. To get them to patients, more and better biomarkers will be needed, Fillit says, along with “exploratory trials.” Read more.

What to read around the web today

‘How am I going to feed her?’ Parents of premature babies struggle amid formula shortage, New York Times
How long Covid could change the way we think about disability, Washington Post
Adam's Take: A dose of transparency by Cel-Sci does nothing to burnish its failed cancer immunotherapy, STAT
How an airport nail salon became the frontline of U.S. Covid surveillance, Bloomberg
Praxis’ novel antidepressant fails make-or-break trial, STAT