What a Democratic Senate means for Biden health and science priorities

The outlook for the White House’s health and science priorities just got a whole lot brighter. With a Democratic Senate, as the Associated Press projected Saturday night, it will be much easier for President Biden to get nominees confirmed, including his choice to lead the NIH. Public health officials like NIAID’s Anthony Fauci will face less scrutiny because Democrats will maintain power over key health committees. And Democrats will be a check on a possible Republican House that might want to clash with Biden over issues like government funding and Medicare.

But STAT’s Rachel Cohrs also notes a slim majority makes it highly unlikely Democrats will repeat such accomplishments as garnering billions in pandemic relief funding to passing the largest drug pricing reform in 20 years to placing a slate of nominees to lead the health care bureaucracy. Read more.

Introducing the next generation of scientific superstars

There are certain times of year that reliably lift our spirits — and who couldn't use a break these days? Maybe it’s Opening Day for baseball fans or Marathon Monday (aka runners’ Christmas) for those of us who pound the pavement. At STAT, it’s Wunderkinds season, where we celebrate the unheralded heroes of science and medicine. That means poring over hundreds of nominations from across North America in search for the next generation of scientific superstars — and then getting to tell the winners’ stories.

This year’s class of 28 Wunderkinds were selected from more than 200 brilliant researchers. Read their inspiring stories and hear from three of them in this video: health policy and drug pricing researcher Hussain Lalani; Julia Joung, a molecular biologist developing genetic screening technologies; and Avinash Manjula Basavanna, who researches engineered living materials and has developed a printable ink made from bacteria.

Far from Silicon Valley, Google to pilot a search tool for health care

You might think Google would test its latest health care research tool closer to Silicon Valley than rural Wisconsin, “where caregivers are about as likely to encounter a moose as a machine learning engineer,” as STAT’s Casey Ross puts it. But Mile Bluff Medical Center, along with Tuscaloosa, Ala.-based DCH Health System, represent ideal settings for the tech giant’s next big experiment in medicine: embedding search capabilities into fragmented patient data.

Google’s pilot project, announced today, integrates its Care Studio search tool into electronic health record systems used by Mile Bluff and DCH, both of which depend on software made by Meditech. The idea is to make it faster and easier for caregivers to compile patient records like previous lab results and diagnoses housed in disparate systems and formats. That’s a huge challenge in smaller health systems without teams of data scientists to wrangle their records. Read more.

Closer look: Cigna's VillageMD investment bets on a younger crowd

(JULIA RENDLEMAN/GETTY IMAGES)

It’s a trend: Insurers are buying into the health care provider space at an impressive clip. The latest example is Cigna’s $2.5 billion investment in the primary care provider VillageMD, owned by Walgreens and itself gobbling up the multi-speciality provider Summit Health. What’s different about this deal is that Cigna is testing the value-based care model not on Medicare Advantage patients but on a new, unproven group of people: the younger, healthier crowd who get health insurance through their jobs.

Value-based care typically means insurers get paid a set amount to cover all of their members’ medical costs. They can save money by monitoring their members’ chronic conditions to avoid expensive surgeries or lengthy hospital stays. When it comes to younger, generally healthier people, it’s unclear how much money can be saved when bad outcomes are less likely. STAT’s Tara Bannow has more.

Opinion: More access to PET scans is no way to fix health inequities in Alzheimer's

In theory, better access to amyloid-PET scans should ease racial inequities in Alzheimer’s disease, as Linda Goler Blount called for in a First Opinion essay we told you about last month. Black people are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s, so being screened and having greater access to treatment should help, right? But in another First Opinion, researchers whose work focuses on PET scanning warn that increased access will mean more misdiagnoses and more people getting Aduhelm, a treatment they believe is more harmful than beneficial.

“In our opinion, the white matter changes are most likely an expression of Aduhelm-induced brain damage,” Poul F. Høilund-Carlsen of the University of Southern Denmark, Abass Alavi of the University of Pennsylvania, and Jorge R. Barrio of UCLA write. “Greater access to amyloid-PET scanning will be more likely to harm people, including Black people, rather than help them.” Read more.

Rats feel the beat, too

(2022 Ito et al.)

A Mozart concerto? Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”? Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”? A new study in Science Advances tells us rats do indeed move to the music. I wouldn’t call it dancing, but a video shows a white rat on its hind legs bobbing to the beat of this eclectic mixtape. It’s all about the timing when auditory and motor systems interact to move to music. That ability may be more widespread than we humans believe — and may reveal more about how our brains work.

The researchers show that rats do more than react to sound. Complex neural and motor processes recognize, respond to, and then predict the beat in a song. This synchronicity appears to be innate in rats, which, while wearing tiny accelerometers to measure head movements, swayed and bobbed without any training to the 120 to 140 beats per minute that we humans prefer, too.

What we're reading

Biden believes Congress must codify Roe v. Wade, top aide says, Axios
She was a celebrated oncologist. Why did she hide her breast cancer until it was too late? Boston Globe
Boom and bust: Whose biotech VC assets have grown and shrunk the most? STAT
A crash course in organ transplants helps Ukraine's cash-strapped healthcare system, NPR
Don was ill. Six buddies reunited 58 years after graduation to help him, Wall Street Journal