How telehealth got hooked on drug-first thinking, & Nobel news

Plus: Conversion therapy at the Supreme Court tomorrow

October 6, 2025 Check out STAT+

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By Theresa Gaffney Morning Rounds Writer and Reporter

Good morning and happy Monday. Is it impossible to name a famous 28 year old? Thank goodness for Defector, a news site that asks important questions like these.

prizes Medicine Nobel goes to trio for immune system discoveries Three scientists who helped uncover how our body keeps our immune system in check — enabling it to fight off dangerous invaders while recognizing our own tissues as a friend that should be spared — won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday. The award went to Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries around what's known as peripheral immune tolerance, work that the Nobel committee touted as deepening our understanding of why autoimmune diseases do occur and enabling the development of potential treatments for those conditions as well as certain cancers.  Brunkow is the 14th woman to receive the prize. Read more here.  courts At the Supreme Court this week: Conversion therapy The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments tomorrow in Chiles v. Salazar, which challenges a Colorado law banning licensed mental health practitioners from trying to change a young person's sexual or gender identity — a practice widely known as conversion therapy. It's the first time the nation's highest court has accepted a case on such prohibitions, and how the justices rule could have far-reaching consequences for the regulation of medicine and the balancing of civil rights for LGBTQ+ people against religious freedom. Almost half of U.S. states have banned licensed counselors from performing conversion therapy on minors. The practice — which can include psychological or behavioral counseling, aversion therapy, and religious rituals — has historically targeted gay youth, but trans or nonbinary people also report undergoing these experiences. I wrote about the major arguments on each side, which issues will be central to the court's decision, and how the ruling could reverberate through health care. Read more. first opinion Is this TB research actually dangerous? Sarah Stanley's lab had been operating safely for more than a decade when she received a letter from the NIH this summer, ordering her to stop her research. Her team was investigating Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. The work was deemed too "dangerous" because it involves "gain of function," a category of research that Stanley says has been both politicized and widely misunderstood.  "My work isn't dangerous," Stanley writes in a new First Opinion essay. "But stopping research that could lead to cures could be." Medical advances and public health efforts have essentially eradicated TB from the U.S. and western Europe. But globally, the infectious disease kills more people than any other — and it's getting harder to treat as drug resistance increases. Read more from Stanley to learn more about gain of function, why certain practices are common in TB research, and what's at stake if these kinds of studies continue to be limited.

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special report How telehealth got hooked on drug-first thinking Thumỹ Phan for STAT  If you were in New York around 2018, you might remember when cacti started appearing in subway stations, an advertisement for telehealth company Hims and its erectile dysfunction drug. Since then, telehealth has become a growing part of the U.S. health care system — and an increasingly valuable marketing funnel. While companies like Teledoc had existed for over a decade before Hims burst onto the scene, it was a lot harder to turn a profit on virtual care than it has been with drugs. And then, as STAT's Katie Palmer explains in part 1 of her special report, The Virtual Rx Boom, there was the GLP-1 upheaval. These weight loss medications have served as the proof point for drug-first telehealth businesses across many more conditions. I urge you to read Katie's comprehensive story on how telehealth went from a way to help patients access doctors, to a way to help companies sell drugs. She gets into the different business models companies are using as they compete to write scripts for as many people as possible, including the criticisms each side levies at the other. Read more. europe Closing in on a pharma policy overhaul in Europe European officials are nearing the finish line on the biggest shake-up to European pharmaceutical policy in decades, with major impacts on everything from how quickly new medicines are rolled out across the continent to how willing drugmakers are to invest in the E.U. Looming in the background is the U.S. campaign to get Europe to pay more for medicines.  E.U. negotiators are in the process of reconciling three versions of the proposal put forth by different groups, and there's some expectation that they could strike a deal on compromise legislation before the end of the year. In his latest, STAT's Andrew Joseph outlines what the legislation is trying to achieve, the key differences between each proposal, and how Trump's demands that Europe pay more for drugs may be shaping the discussions. Read more.

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What we're reading 'Crunchy moms' have stayed away from Tylenol for years, Wall Street Journal What happens to school lunches in the MAHA era? New Yorker Colorado board makes first-in-the-nation move by setting a payment limit on an Amgen drug, STAT States are cutting Medicaid provider payments long before Trump cuts hit, NPR

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Thanks for reading! More next time,

theresa.gaffney@statnews.com

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