summit moments
The best bits from day one of the STAT Summit:
Alissa Ambrose/STAT
It was a great first day at the Summit. One of my favorite parts was a video testimonial from Michelle Campbell and her daughter Shelby, who spoke about Shelby's experience receiving gene therapy for beta thalassemia. Shelby is 8 — almost 9 — years old, and described her experience with gene therapy to the audience with the biggest, sweetest smile on her face. "It got harder each day," she said, remembering how one of the side effects of treatment was that everything began to taste funny. She understands how the doctors took her cells far away and "changed them" to help her get better so she doesn't need regular blood infusions anymore. (Read more about Shelby's experience in Brittany Trang's great profile from last year.)
Here are some other highlights from day one:
- One audience member asked former Trump staffer Joe Grogan about the Republican party's "concept of a plan" for health care: "Is part of the plan to completely destabilize the FDA as a regulatory body?" Grogan had a one-word answer: "No."
- STAT's executive editor and co-founder Rick Berke is always ready to ask the hard questions. Yesterday, he repeatedly asked Bristol Meyers Squibb CEO Chris Boerner who he wants to see win the election. Boerner held firm in his answer: "We work with both sides of the aisle and transparently, both sides of the aisle have folks who get what we do in this industry, and both sides of the aisle have opportunities for us to continue to engage."
- Sonia Vallabh spoke about her experience running a prion research laboratory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard — work that she began after learning she inherited a mutation from her mother that causes genetic prion disease. She had so many thoughtful, poignant things to say, but this was perhaps my favorite quote: "No one just wakes up and feels, 'I'm in a position to make a courageous decision and a courageous departure from precedent.'"
- The photo above! Okay, this is a slight cheat, since the photo is actually from Tuesday evening. But in celebration of STAT's Usha Lee McFarling receiving the 2024 Bernard Lo, MD Award in Bioethics, we had three eras of the Morning Rounds team together. (From left to right: Liz Cooney, who is now our cardiovascular reporter, me, STAT's first-ever newsletter writer Megan Thielking, and longtime former MR editor Sarah Mupo.)
doctors-to-be
NYU study finds its 3-year med school is just as good!
In 2013, the first class graduated from a new, three-year accelerated program at the NYU School of Medicine — an alternative to its traditional four-year program. A study published this week in Academic Medicine compared the training performances of all 136 graduates from the first seven years of the accelerated program to the 681 traditional graduates at NYU in that period. Researchers concluded that, overall, students in the accelerated program performed similarly in school and in their internships as those in the traditional program.
There's a major caveat here: All these students went to NYU, and the study itself was done by NYU researchers. But it's an interesting thought — medical training is known to be grueling and expensive. If training can be shortened without sacrificing the education, it could be a game changer.
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