| | | |   By Elizabeth Cooney | Good morning. We have a new STAT Report from Angus Chen, Targeting cancer: the new frontier of immunotherapy and precision oncology. Here’s a column today on one of those targets: claudin-6. | | | Moderna says its vaccine for adult RSV works, joining a soon-to-be-crowded field  (NIAID) Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, may not have been top of mind for many people before this winter, and if it did register, it was familiar from infecting kids. Like so many things in the pandemic era, that’s different now, for better or for worse. RSV has been sending both children and adults to hospitals overflowing with other respiratory illnesses, but new vaccines to prevent RSV are in sight. Yesterday Moderna reported its vaccine reduced the rate of lower respiratory disease in adults 60 years or older by 83.7%.
And Moderna’s not alone. Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have already presented results for their RSV vaccines in older individuals. “To have three vaccines with a good chance to be licensed and this kind of efficacy data is really pretty amazing,” Larry Anderson, a professor of pediatric infectious disease at Emory University School of Medicine, told STAT’s Matthew Herper. Read more. | Drug prices are going — you guessed it — up Big buyers of prescription medicines expect prices to rise by an average of 8% annually over the next three years, a slight uptick from a year ago. And 19% believe three-quarters of the anticipated increases will come from a shift to higher-priced, newer therapies. That’s up from 8% a year ago, according to a new survey from analysts at Cowen that polled 26 hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers, and HMOs. Together they purchased about $90 billion in medicines in 2022, or about two-fifths of U.S. retail drug purchases.
The medications most often cited for rising prices treat cancer and diabetes, but also include cell and gene therapies for any number of diseases. As for generic drugs, which account for nearly 90% of all prescriptions filled in the U.S., the payers anticipate the average unit cost will remain flat. STAT’s Ed Silverman has more on the report. | Medical debt continues to decline  Percentage of people in families having problems paying medical bills in the past 12 months, by sex, age group, and race and Hispanic origin, U.S. 2021 (National Center for Health Statistics, Health Interview Survey, 2021) Medical debt leads all other kinds of debt in the U.S., pushing people to choose between paying for food, housing, or clothing and needed health care. A new CDC survey tells us that in 2021, the percentage of people living in families struggling to pay medical bills in the past 12 months declined from 2019 (14%) to 2021 (10.8%). That means 10.5 million fewer people were in families having problems paying medical bills than the 45.5 million in 2019.
People were more likely to have problems paying medical bills if they had low family income, were uninsured, or lived in a state that had not expanded Medicaid coverage. The trend of fewer people reporting medical debt has now hit three years, including the pandemic. The researchers point to the CARES Act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 for not just direct payments but also flexibility with creditors, additional unemployment assistance, subsidized payroll for affected small businesses, and improvements in paid sick leave. | Apply for STAT Madness! Has your institution innovated in ways worth celebrating? Submit your application to be considered for our bracket-style tournament to find the best innovations in science and medicine here. | Closer look: Some are trying risky sources for weight-loss drugs  (Christine Kao/STAT) As new obesity drugs remain hard to obtain, some are turning to riskier, alternative sources: They order peptides from online lab-chemical suppliers to mix at home, and then inject them into their abdomens. Bodybuilding and biohacking devotees have long sought out these sources to buy chemicals for building muscles and burning fat. Now, some people with clinical obesity are also turning to at least a dozen websites, hoping to obtain semaglutide or tirzepatide as the original medications from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly continue to be difficult to find. Others rely on compound pharmacies, which mix the active ingredients with other chemicals to offer ready-made compounds.
“It just shows you the level of desperation that people have and the level of unmet need that we have when it comes to treating obesity effectively,” Jamy Ard of the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Weight Management Center told STAT’s Elaine Chen. Read more. | New growths rare in repeat colonoscopies 10 years after initial negative test, study finds Colonoscopies to detect colorectal cancers are a success story among screening tests, but a new study calls into question how soon people should repeat them after an initial negative result. In JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers analyzed records of more than 120,000 patients in Germany who had a second colonoscopy at least 10 years after their first ones at age 55. The study found that few patients had new benign tumors or abnormal growths that could become cancer: about 6% to 7% in men and 4% to 5% in women 10 years after a negative colonoscopy.
That prevalence was 40% lower than among all colonoscopy patients. Rates for women after a previous negative test were 40% lower than in men, a difference that grew larger the younger women were. The authors endorse the 10-year testing interval, but ask if some people can wait longer. | Meal size and frequency — not timing — linked to weight change You’ve probably heard of intermittent fasting, a weight-loss plan to eat during a limited number of daytime hours. Like much research on nutrition, the results are mixed across small studies that rely on people to recall what they ate. A new study in Journal of the American Heart Association reports that the size and frequency of meals had more impact on people’s weight change than the timing: More high-calorie meals, eaten more often were linked to weight gain while timing was not.
In their analysis of 547 adults’ electronic health records and information participants entered on a mobile app, the researchers found no tie between the time interval from first to last meal and weight change during the six-year study. The authors emphasize their observational study can't prove direct cause and effect. “Further large-scale studies with long follow-up time are needed,” they wrote. | | | | | What we're reading - After a brief pandemic reprieve, rural workers return to life without paid leave, Kaiser Health News
- The father of the abortion pill, New York Times
- After 4 years of big talk, mega startup Sana prepares to deliver some data, STAT
- A guide to 9 global buzzwords for 2023, from 'polycrisis' to 'zero-dose children,' NPR
- Pfizer says it will widen access to hundreds of off-patent medicines in low-income countries, STAT
| Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,  | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Me | | | | Kendall Square February 9 | | | | | New York City February 16 | | | | | | | |
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