| | | |   By Elizabeth Cooney | Good morning. Not a fan of formal exercise? We've got a study for you. | | | Jynneos vaccine protected people against mpox  The mpox vaccine worked: A new CDC study says people who received one or two doses of mpox vaccine contracted the infection at substantially lower rates than unvaccinated people. Facing a growing global outbreak and limited supplies of Jynneos — a vaccine made by Bavarian Nordic and originally designed to protect against smallpox — the Biden administration moved in early August to recommend intradermal administration to stretch doses of the vaccine as public health authorities rushed to contain spread of mpox.
Now the CDC says unvaccinated people were 9.6 times more likely than fully vaccinated people to develop mpox and 7.4 times more likely than people who had received a single dose of the vaccine. The fact that intradermal administration wasn’t less effective than subcutaneous dosing is good news, though durability remains to be seen, Jay Varma of Weill Cornell told STAT’s Helen Branswell. Read more. | After conflict-of-interest criticism, Stanford moves research probe to outside investigator Stanford has turned to an outside law firm to investigate alleged research misconduct by its president. Mark Filip, a former federal judge and Department of Justice official who now defends white-collar clients, will lead the probe into allegations of altered images in papers co-authored by Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the university said yesterday. The move follows a report in the Stanford Daily that Felix Baker, a trustee on a special committee formed to examine the matter, runs a hedge fund with a sizable stake in Denali Therapeutics, a biotech cofounded by Tessier-Lavigne. Baker has since left the committee.
The Stanford Daily was also the first to report that scientists on PubPeer, a site where researchers can flag potential anomalies in academic articles, noted a series of Tessier-Lavigne’s academic papers appeared to include digitally altered images, leading to scrutiny last month of the prominent neuroscientist. Read more. | Short bursts of activity tied to lower risk of death, just like vigorous exercise You don’t have to run marathons to lower your risk of an early death, new research suggests. Making use of wearable devices and the wealth of health information in the U.K. Biobank, researchers report in Nature Medicine that a little more than one or two minutes a day of vigorous activity — like super-fast walking — reduced the risk of dying over nearly seven years of follow-up. For the more than 25,000 participants with an average age of 61, that risk fell 38% to 40% for any cause of death and for cancer mortality, and dropped 48% t0 49% for risk of cardiovascular death, compared to people who did no physical activity. Those reductions were comparable to the benefits linked to more formal exercise.
The authors conclude that brief bouts of activity could help people who don’t exercise, but acknowledge theirs is an observational study. People who didn’t move could have had health problems, for example. | Women deserve more data-driven answers about breast cancer risk; it's up to us Approximately 13% of women in the United States will develop breast cancer in their lifetime1. That’s one in eight women. We have an opportunity to advance the healthcare system to one that is driven by knowing risk and getting ahead of disease before it may even happen. Let’s break down barriers and increase the adoption of genetic testing across the continuum of care to improve health outcomes for patients in breast cancer — and ultimately, many other cancers. Learn more.
1. Breastcancer.org, Breast Cancer Facts and Statistics, https://www.breastcancer.org/facts-statistics | Closer look: A CEO (and father) navigates the divide between health care and tech  (adobe) Companies creating artificial intelligence applications for health and health care over the last decade have seen some successes, but the industry is better known for not yet living up to its potential — think IBM Watson, Michael Elashoff, CEO and co-founder of Cornerstone AI, writes in a STAT First Opinion. He says that’s because health AI sits on the border between health care and tech, with all the cultural differences that divide entails. Health care is heavily regulated, tech is not. Tech uses open source software and libraries; health care uses proprietary software. Then there’s average benefit versus individual harm.
“The challenge of tech and health care working together arises not because one side is wrong, but because both sides are right,” Elashoff says. Then he shares examples from his company’s experience and his infant daughter’s meningitis treatment. Read more. | Covering an Alzheimer's drug, sharing Covid data, and diversifying clinical trials Two government health officials and one nonprofit leader made their cases at the Milken Future of Health Summit for examining new data, being empowered to collect new public health data, and generating rare-disease data with equity in mind. Some highlights: - CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure on coverage of the Alzheimer’s drug lecanemab: “I can’t speak to any specifics, but just to say that our door is really open. We will look at it as new data comes.”
- CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on access to local Covid stats: “There have been numerous pieces written about how the CDC is not sharing the data on ‘x,’ and I just say, ‘Boy, would I love to share the data on “x.” I’d love to have the data on “x” so I can share it with you.’”
- Rare-X executive director Nicole Boice on equity in rare disease clinical trials: “All the tech in the world doesn’t solve this right now. … It is really about understanding these lived experiences and challenges that many of us haven’t.”
| Just over half of Covid preprints were later published in peer-reviewed journals Nothing like a pandemic to push preprints onto center stage. Research on what we used to call the “novel coronavirus” was coming quickly as the Covid-19 public health emergency unfolded in its first year. Scientists would get their findings out faster than the usual publication process by posting them immediately on servers that acknowledge their preliminary status. Now a study in JAMA Internal Medicine tracks how many of those articles published on the medRxiv preprint server in 2020 found their way into traditional publications.
They report that subsequent publication in a scientific journal ranged from 43.5% of preprints in March 2020 to 60.6% of those posted in August 2020. Nearly half were published in what’s considered the top quartile of journals. All told, a little more than half (51.2%) of preprints related to Covid-19 posted in 2020 were later published in peer-reviewed journals as of October 2022. | | | | | What we're reading - Puerto Rico was promised billions for safe water. Taps are still running dry, Washington Post
- Schizophrenia and a journey through California's failed mental health system, Los Angeles Times
- FDA authorizes updated Covid-19 boosters for youngest children, STAT
- Pausing breast cancer treatment for pregnancy appears safe, Associated Press
- Mark Cuban teams with a business coalition in bid to lower drug costs for employers, STAT
| Thanks for reading! More Monday,  | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Me | | | | | |
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