| | | |   By Elizabeth Cooney | Good morning from San Diego! This is West Coast biotech reporter Jonathan Wosen filling in for Liz. You’ll be hearing from me tomorrow, too. Here’s some news to kick off your morning, from gender inequity in scientific authorship to a deep dive into wearable device data. | | | Female researchers less likely to be cited on studies and patents, analysis finds 
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Scientists like to believe they work in a meritocracy, that the best ideas always win and the people responsible for those ideas get the credit. But a new study shows otherwise: Female scientists are 13% less likely to be credited on papers than their male counterparts and 58% less likely to be included on patents. The findings, reported in the journal Nature, reflect an analysis of administrative records from more than 100,000 scientists working at nearly 80 academic institutions. Researchers found the gender gap was even worse for papers published in prestigious journals, and that women were under-cited despite reporting a broader range of author-worthy contributions than men. It’s a long-running problem, STAT’s Elissa Welle explains, and one that points to systemic issues in academia that can drive women and other marginalized groups out of science altogether. Read more. | U.K. health officials find poliovirus in London wastewater Here's an item from STAT's infectious disease reporter, Helen Branswell: Health authorities in the United Kingdom said Wednesday they have been finding polioviruses in London wastewater. The viruses, discovered between February and May, are so-called vaccine-derived polioviruses — viruses from the oral polio vaccine used in some parts of the world, though not in the U.K. The viruses in the vaccine have been weakened, but they can spread from person to person and, over time, can regain the power to paralyze if they infect a person who is not fully vaccinated. According to the U.K. Health Security Agency, analyses of the viruses suggest they may have been spreading among closely linked individuals in North and East London, suggesting parents of children under the age of 5 should check to see if their kids have received all necessary polio vaccine doses. Wastewater surveillance has long been used to look for polioviruses as part of the global polio eradication effort, as Helen wrote in The Atlantic a decade ago. 
Closer Look: In search of evidence that wearables generate useful health data
About 1 out of every 5 Americans has a Fitbit, Apple Watch, or some other gadget that tracks everything from how quickly their hearts are thumping, how often their feet are moving, and the quality of their sleep. Stephen Friend, cofounder of the nonprofit 4YouandMe, is trying to turn these data into useful health insights, writes STAT’s Mario Aguilar. The organization has launched a study of 1,000 pregnant people in a bid to collect hundreds of measurements from each participant and, importantly, to show that doing so can paint a detailed picture of each pregnancy and person-to-person differences. It’s a first step toward predicting and preventing complications. Christine Lemke, co-CEO of Evidation Health, says the stakes are high: “I think this study either makes or breaks them in many ways.” Read more. | Pioneering precision in neuroscience We are living in an era of precision medicine, where scientific innovations have improved drug targeting across various patient populations and most therapeutic areas. However, within neuroscience, the growing unmet needs, everchanging landscape, and complex biology of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders have made precision medicine difficult to apply. At Janssen, researchers aim to lead the neuroscience revolution to reduce the burden and disability caused by neuropsychiatric, neurological, and neurodegenerative diseases. Read the article here. | New report: drug company-sponsored studies are more likely to find that high medicine prices are cost-effective When public and private insurers weigh whether to cover a drug, they often use so-called cost-effectiveness studies to evaluate whether a treatment’s price tag is offset by overall savings to the health care system. But a new report finds that studies bankrolled by drug companies are more likely to conclude that a medicine’s benefits outweigh its costs than are independent analyses. By one measure, industry-sponsored studies were twice as likely to conclude that a drug was cost effective, STAT's Ed Silverman writes. The finding, based on a review of nearly 8,200 cost-effectiveness analyses, reinforces long-standing concerns about the biases of pharma-backed research. The study’s authors note that skewed studies can affect coverage decisions, especially in low- and middle-income countries that don’t have the money to run their own analyses, warning that “bias might lead to higher drug prices in these countries where resources to pay for healthcare are scarce.” Read more. The debate over ARPA-H just won’t go away By all appearances, the debate around the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), President Biden’s high-risk, high-reward science agency, was over. Congress had set aside $1 billion for the agency, somehow managing to get both parties on board. But on Wednesday, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) reignited a simmering debate around how the agency will operate. Eshoo celebrated the passage of a House bill she authored that would make ARPA-H an independent entity, despite the Biden administration’s stated preference that the agency operate as part of the National Institutes of Health. The president’s camp insists that keeping ARPA-H under the NIH umbrella would improve communication, while Eshoo is more concerned that the NIH’s risk-averse culture would undermine the new agency’s ambitions, STAT’s Lev Facher writes. Read more. Opinion: We need better a explanation for why clinical trial diversity matters Demanding that clinical trials become more diverse has become trendy, with everyone from the federal government to scientific organizations and private companies making similar-sounding calls for research studies to recruit participants from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. But NYU bioethicist Arthur Caplan sees a key piece missing from these conversations: a clear explanation of why trial diversity matters. In a First Opinion essay, Caplan writes that ensuring drugs are safe and effective in smaller ethnic groups might require doing more studies outside the U.S. And he adds that one common argument for trial diversity — making sure everyone has access to clinical trials — doesn’t quite make sense given that most trials fail and that real-world access to medicines typically comes down to what happens after approval. His takeaway? It’s time to move beyond monolithic racial categories and think of trial diversity in more sophisticated, precise terms. Read more. What to read around the web today - Side Effects May Include … A Completely New Hair Color? The Atlantic
- How COVID has deepened inequality — in six stark graphics. Nature
- New Senate proposal to lower insulin prices would let drugmakers lock in their current profits. STAT
- ‘A Lot to Figure Out’: ALS Patients Weigh Travel to Canada to Get Drug for Deadly Illness. Wall Street Journal
| Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,  | | | | | | | | | |
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