White House links drug pricing law to lower cancer death rates

The White House is pitching an added benefit to Democrats’ recent drug pricing reform package: lower cancer death rates. A new analysis by the Council of Economic Advisers focused on the new law capping Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket costs for pharmacy drugs at $2,000 per year, starting in 2025. Current Medicare enrollees diagnosed with cancer would save, on average, nearly $1,600 per year on prescription drugs because of that cap.

The White House is connecting the dots between the drug-pricing law and President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, whose goal is to cut cancer deaths by 50% over the next 25 years. If patients can afford drugs that they couldn’t otherwise buy, then that could extend patients’ lives, White House Cancer Moonshot Coordinator Danielle Carnival told STAT’s Rachel Cohrs for her exclusive story. “Turning some of these cancers into chronic, manageable diseases is a huge win, but it comes at a cost,” Carnival said. Read more.

Next up for the ‘human genome project’ for the brain: a detailed map

Scientists hoping to answer fundamental questions about the brain just got $600 million in fresh NIH funding yesterday to create a detailed map of the whole brain in order to devise new ways to target therapeutics and other molecules to specific brain cell populations. Teams from across the country, from the Salk Institute to Duke University to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, among other places, will embark on a project like the Human Genome Project. The total cost will reach $5 billion by 2026 for work related to the BRAIN Initiative, launched in 2014.

“I really do view this as like the Human Genome Project. We have the ability now to define cells like we were able to define genes,” neuroscientist Ed Lein of the Allen Institute in Seattle told STATs Jonathan Wosen. Read more.

Congress to avert pink slip crisis at FDA

After weeks of arduous negotiations, lawmakers agreed yesterday to at least do the bare minimum needed by Sept. 30 to keep the FDA funded for another five years, according to two congressional aides who spoke with my colleague Rachel Cohrs. A failure to continue funding would have resulted in pink slips to the thousands of FDA employees whose jobs are funded by so-called user fees paid by industry. It would also have meant that approval deadlines for critical drugs could have slipped.

There’s quite a bit of intrigue, however, about if any minor modifications to how the agency operates will be tacked on. An aide to Senate health committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said four key lawmakers had agreed on a “practically clean” bill, but provided no details about which policies could be included. And it’s not clear that deal has buy-in from prominent leaders, either. A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he supports a clean reauthorization.

Closer look: A new approach to lung cancer surgery could mean less is more

(NORTHWESTERN MEDICINE)

It’s not often you hear hopeful news about lung cancer. If a patient’s tumor is discovered early enough for surgery to be an option, the standard of care has dictated removing one of the lung’s five lobes. Taking out less of the lung would be easier on patients, but excising an entire lobe in a larger operation has been a way to ensure all the cancer is gone. Now a new approach is gaining momentum: It takes out less of the lung by combining CT guidance, robotic bronchoscopy, and minimally invasive techniques during surgery.

Patients go home the same day, but it’s not without controversy as studies are still underway. “We previously were so dogmatic about lobe, lobe, lobe,” Jeff Velotta of UCSF told STAT’s Angus Chen. “I do think the trend will be towards more sub-lobar or lung sparing resections, but whether I would say the gold standard should be lung sparing is still a discussion.” Read more.

Covid-19 raises the risk of long-term brain problems, large study confirms

At this stage of long Covid research, calls for longer-term studies are coming due. Research in Nature Medicine offers an update based on 12 months of data from the VA system (before vaccines were widely available) looking at the longer-term impact of Covid-19 on neurological outcomes after patients recovered from their acute infections. Compared to a control group of 11 million patients, the 154,068 Covid-19 patients had a higher risk of complications including stroke (50%), memory and cognition disorders (77%), seizures (80%), movement disorders (42%), and mental health disorders (43%). Their average age was 61, and the sicker they were, the greater their risk.

Younger adults had a higher risk of memory and cognitive disorders, sensory disorders, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and encephalitis or encephalopathy. Older adults were more vulnerable to mental health disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, and migraine and seizures. “Some of the neurologic disorders reported here are serious chronic conditions that will impact some people for a lifetime,” the authors warn.

'Oscars of Science' are back on the red carpet

The 2023 Breakthrough Prizes — sponsored by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki — honor luminaries in life sciences, mathematics, and physics. Unlike last year’s, the winning work doesn’t involve Covid-19. In the life sciences, the $3 million prizes go to:

Clifford Brangwynne of Princeton and Anthony Hyman of the Max Planck Institute for their discovery of a fundamental mechanism of cellular organization that separates proteins and RNA into membraneless droplets (video here).
Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of DeepMind for developing a deep learning AI method that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence (video here).
Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba for discovering that narcolepsy is caused by the loss of a small population of brain cells that make a wake-promoting substance (video here).

What to read around the web today

Exclusive: Shakeup with Optum’s health data licensing sparks an outcry among scientists, STAT
Uganda confirms 7 Ebola cases, races to halt outbreak, Associated Press
People with skin conditions face stigma. Monkeypox has made it worse, Washington Post
New details on Apple Watch study emphasize Medicaid enrollment, STAT
Taste of kale makes unborn babies grimace, finds research, The Guardian