Pining for the days when biotech delivered good news

The XBI fell more than 4% yesterday. The closely tracked index of biotech stocks is now down 13% since the announcement of President Trump's tariff policy. It's down 22% for the year.

Last night, during a speech at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner, Trump said once again that tariffs would also be placed on pharmaceuticals.

The hits to biotech just keep coming.

vTFET-(3)

government

Were the huge waves of HHS firings legal?

After the abrupt firing of roughly 20,000 HHS employees — including thousands at the FDA and CDC — legal experts are raising red flags about whether the reduction-in-force processes followed federal law.

Workers say entire programs were gutted without transparency, retention scores were riddled with error, and internal leadership was left in the dark, STAT's Isabella Cueto reports.

Class action suits are now brewing. Some of the recently fired employees say their notices listed false performance ratings, potentially invalidating the cuts.

"They didn't seem to have anything based in reality," a former communications worker at AHRQ told STAT.

nih

NIH data ban blocks researchers in China, Russia, elsewhere

The NIH has abruptly blocked researchers in China, Russia, Iran, and a handful of other "countries of concern" from accessing key U.S. health data repositories — including SEER, a vast trove of cancer data. SEER is a very important resource for Chinese cancer researchers: In 2019 alone, they published 459 papers using the database.

The decision was effective last Friday, FierceBiotech writes, and seems to stretch the intent of a Biden-era executive order aimed at commercial data transfers, not open-access research.

It's still unclear whether U.S. collaborators can still share data with researchers in those countries. But there are mounting concerns that shutting down access to these databases could stymie global scientific research.

artificial intelligence

AI agents are coming for health care

Health tech will soon see a flood of AI agents — that is, digital task-completion tools. Companies like Hippocratic AI, Salesforce, and Innovaccer are pitching these agents as scalable labor for appointment scheduling, care coordination, and prior authorization — but many providers say the tech isn't mature enough to be deployed, STAT's Brittany Trang writes.

While the hope is that one day, these tools can unify interfaces across the fragmented health care ecosystem, there are still concerns around reliability, safety, and trust.

"Quality and safety is probably my top hesitation. I can't release something that's wrong 25% of the time or omit something significant 25% of the time into care delivery without a human," said Rebecca Mishuris, chief medical information officer at Mass General Brigham. "Just won't do it."