General Catalyst wants to take over a safety-net health system in Akron. The city has questions

"It's a deeply valued community institution [and] we just want to make sure they understand that," Mayor Shammas Malik said.

February 1, 2024 Check out STAT+

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By Elizabeth Cooney Reporter, Morning Rounds Writer

Good morning. It's happening. Today the Biden administration is taking the first steps in negotiating Medicare drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, administration officials said. That means opening offers have been made, but those offers will not be made public unless a manufacturer chooses to do so, a senior administration official said. STAT's Rachel Cohrs tells us more.

alzheimer's disease Biogen drops ownership of Aduhelm Cue the funeral dirge. Years after a bruising debate over its approval, Aduhelm is now dead to Biogen, which said yesterday it was giving up its ownership of the polarizing Alzheimer's drug. Approved in 2021 and subjected to questions about its supporting evidence and controversial path through FDA's regulatory process, its sales proved to be meager. Neurimmune, the Swiss company that invented Aduhelm, will regain full rights to the drug; Biogen will also terminate an ongoing clinical trial meant to prove the treatment's benefits for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's. Biogen has focused its attention instead on Leqembi, an Alzheimer's treatment that won FDA approval last year. The company is also at work on earlier-stage medicines for Alzheimer's. STAT's Damian Garde has much more on the two-decade saga of Aduhelm, which arose from a 2005 scientific summit in the Swiss Alps. chronic disease What looks like dementia could be liver disease Speaking of dementia, a new study in JAMA Network Open suggests that in up to 10% of patients diagnosed with dementia, undiagnosed liver disease may be to blame for causing similar neurological symptoms: trouble with cognition, motor skills, sleep, and mood. That could be good but challenging news. There are treatments for the complication of cirrhosis called hepatic encephalopathy, such as combining antibiotics and the synthetic sugar lactulose to remove the buildup of toxins in the brain. About half of people with cirrhosis develop hepatic encephalopathy. Here's the catch: Cirrhosis is hard to diagnose before irreversible harm has been done. "It's not a condition that hurts. Patients don't come in asking to be screened for cirrhosis," said Lauren Beste of the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System. "It's easy to see why it could be overlooked, but it's just such an important and lifesaving diagnosis to make early." STAT's Isabella Cueto has more. rare diseases Vertigo drug lifts hope for Niemann-Pick patients Developing a drug for a complex, rare disease poses unique challenges. There's the arduous work of finding promising molecules, and then there's the daunting labor of proving they work. In Niemann-Pick Type C disease, STAT's Jason Mast tells us, there are 500 diagnosed patients worldwide whose slow-moving neurodegenerative disease shows itself in different ways. That makes it harder to prove a medicine slows the condition in a typical year-long placebo-controlled trial.  Now a vertigo treatment from the 1950s is showing promise at easing difficulty with balance and muscle control, which are among the symptoms of a disease that also includes cognitive decline, difficulty with speech and swallowing, enlarged liver, and low muscle tone. The U.K. startup IntraBio published phase 3 data in NEJM yesterday showing the drug significantly outperformed placebo. "For the community, this is very welcome," said Toni Mathieson of the advocacy group Niemann-Pick UK. Read more.

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closer look When a VC firm wants to buy a safety-net hospital Summa Health  General Catalyst is a venture capital firm with investments in health tech startups looking for health systems willing to adopt their blend of AI and tech tools to improve care. Summa Health is a safety-net provider in Akron, Ohio, whose residents are questioning General Catalyst's plans to acquire the hospital, worried that the proposed deal will drive up costs, eliminate jobs, reduce the quality of care, or even shutter the hospital system, about a fifth of whose patients are on Medicaid. "Most of us have family who go there in difficult moments," Mayor Shammas Malik, whose mother received cancer care at Summa Health before her death, told STAT's Mohana Ravindranath. "It's a deeply valued community institution [and] we just want to make sure they understand that, and look forward to building a partnership." In response, Summa spokesman Mike Berstein said Summa is "committed to ongoing dialogue and engaging people across the organization and community throughout the process." Read more. cancer A cancer by any other name Fabrice André, a medical oncologist at Gustave Roussy in France, is not the first to say we should stop naming cancers solely by the organs where they originate. But the president-elect of the European Society of Medical Oncology says a new naming system that emphasizes the molecular characteristics of a cancer would have benefits that are more than academic. Case in point: The first checkpoint inhibitor was successfully tested in melanoma, but patients with other cancers had to wait years for trials to be completed on tumors sharing the same target.  "We're not saying it was a mistake to classify cancers based on anatomy or that people should have done things differently in the past. But look, the framework is no longer adapted to the types of treatments that are available," André told STAT's Angus Chen in an interview about his commentary  in Nature on the topic. "Making 20 to 30 trials sequentially, testing a drug in different patient populations, delays access to therapy." Read more. health tech Here's what doctors say about telemedicine Ever wonder what doctors think about the tech used in telemedicine? CDC researchers asked primary care, surgical specialty, and medical specialty physicians if they were satisfied with the technology:  and if they thought is was appropriate for their patients: Correction: In yesterday's newsletter, a headline mistakenly described how the asthma medication Singulair is taken. It's an oral drug.

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What we're reading The broken promises of the NFL concussion settlement, Washington Post 23andMe's fall from $6 billion to nearly $0, Wall Street Journal As supply crunch starts to ease, Novo Nordisk to offer more doses of obesity drug Wegovy to U.S. patients, STAT Bipartisan bill aims to protect children online, New York Times Cigna to sell Medicare Advantage plans to Blue Cross Blue Shield insurer for $3.3 billion, STAT

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Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,

elizabeth.cooney@statnews.com

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