‘Zoobiquity’: How animals have figured out disease better than humans

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On Thursday was my two-year STAT-iversary. I can’t believe I’ve been here for that long!

As a gift for the occasion, the STAT team made a special code for you: Through the end of the weekend, the code BRITTANY30 will give you 30% off your first year of STAT+ (I feel so cool!).

Now on to a huge deal that I 100% didn’t know about before working at STAT: the Medicare drug price negotiations from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Medicare unveils its negotiated drug prices

Yesterday was a big day in the pharma and health policy worlds: Medicare released the prices of the first 10 drugs it has scrutinized under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The drugs include medications for blood clots, diabetes, heart failure, and arthritis.

Our D.C. bureau was busy bringing you STAT+ coverage:

• The negotiated drugs included Januvia, Entresto, and Enbrel, which each saw more than 30% reductions compared to their 2021 list prices. But that doesn’t mean seniors will see a 30% reduction in what they pay. See Rachel Cohrs Zhang’s story for all of the details.

• President Biden tweeted out a graphic showing how much the negotiations saved Medicare compared to the list prices for the drugs. But Rachel tells us that the president is exaggerating: Medicare doesn’t pay list price, and its current prices are secret.

• Speaking of bragging rights, who gets them? John Wilkerson and Rachel (who was a busy beaver yesterday) tell us about how Harris and Trump are framing the deals.

When animals have solved health issues humans haven’t

STAT’s Nicholas St. Fleur has a fascinating Q&A with cardiologist and evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, who thinks about medicine through a “zoobiquitous” lens: looking at tough-to-solve human medical problems and asking whether animals have already solved that problem in ways humans’ bodies haven’t.

“[Evolution] is R&D on the highest dose of steroids ever,” said Natterson-Horowitz.

She gave the example of how many women stop breastfeeding because of a painful infection called mastitis. She turned to dairy experts for how they’ve solved this problem in cows. “There have been a hundred times more scientific studies written about preventing mastitis in cows than in women,” she told Nick.

Read on for more about this fresh perspective on medicine, including looking to giraffes for heart failure solutions, elephants for cancer resistance, and why human pride is keeping us from inspecting these potential cures.

The good, the bad, and the not-great mpox news

• The bad: Swedish authorities have announced that a person who recently visited the area of Africa experiencing the recently declared mpox public health emergency has contracted a clade I version of the virus. This is the first reported case of clade I outside of the African continent. U.S. officials previously warned clinicians to be on alert for cases of mpox in people who recently traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo or nearby countries.
• The not-great: STAT’s Jason Mast tells us that a smallpox antiviral that authorities hoped would be effective against mpox is no better than placebo. The drug tecovirimat, approved by the FDA in 2018 as TPOXX, was part of an NIH-co-sponsored trial in the DRC, where mpox is endemic. People infected with mpox who were being treated in the hospital responded no faster to tecovirimat than placebo — but both groups experienced less than half the average mortality rate, suggesting that merely receiving care in the hospital helped.
• The good: Helen Branswell also brings us a Q&A with the CEO of Bavarian Nordic, the maker of mpox vaccine Jynneos, about the company’s vaccine inventory. Since the 2022 mpox outbreak, the manufacturer has ramped up its manufacturing capacity and says it can supply millions of vaccines next year — though that depends on orders, of which it only has one at the moment.

Follow STAT’s mpox reporting here.

Summertime and the livin’ isn’t easy

Summertime heat is a big problem for people with disabilities — often in ways that are not obvious to able-bodied people.

“When you wear an artificial limb, it encases that residual limb with a sealed, air-tight material,” said David Gissen, an amputee. “You don’t wrap your arms or legs in plastic when it’s hot outside. But when you’re an amputee, that’s how you wear a leg.”

A longtime triathaloner, Patty Glatfelter saw her relationship with the outdoors change when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which disrupts the body’s ability to send signals down nerves and is even worse above 80 degrees.

She has to know her limits. On a recent trip to Santa Fe, N.M., “we were just walking down the street, waiting at a stop light, and I could feel myself starting to get weaker, so I started looking for a shady spot,” she said. “And then, all of the sudden, my legs just went kaput, and I was falling to the sidewalk.”

Read more from STAT’s Timmy Broderick about how the heat affects people in tangible and hard ways.

Brat summer is ending, deer sausage fall is coming (along with renewed risks)

I grew up in an area where a few — but not all — kids got taken out of school when deer season started. Who isn’t jealous of getting to skip school to do something fun with your family? New research in JAMA Network Open looks at shootings at the beginning of deer hunting season in rural counties to better understand the relationship between the prevalence of guns and gun violence — and the results may be surprising.

The analysis, which mapped shootings in the Gun Violence Archive to the weeks before and after deer hunting season started in each of 854 counties, showed that there was a statistically significant increase in shootings in the first and second weeks after deer season started, which held even if hunting accidents were excluded.

Given that the increase in shootings wasn’t due to hunting accidents and also was more pronounced for short guns than the long guns typically used for hunting, the authors suggested that gun violence isn’t just due to how many guns are in a certain place or population, but the increased influx of guns into public and private spaces.

How people with disabilities are locked out of clinical trials

Earlier this week, the National Council on Disability released a report describing how several federal agencies implicitly and explicitly exclude people with disabilities from clinical trials. For example, 90% of people with Down syndrome also develop Alzheimer’s, but they are regularly excluded from drug trials.

“How can this population benefit from these potentially life-changing treatments if they’re excluded from the trials? And how can anyone know what these therapeutics’ efficacy and safety is on this population — and one of the populations most affected? Exclusion exacts too high a price,” said NCD Vice Chair Emily Voorde in a press release.

Read more from STAT’s Timmy Broderick, including the council’s proposed fixes for the problem.

What we’re reading

• An alternative to the Pap smear is here, no speculum required, New York Times
• Most Black hospitals across the South closed long ago. Their impact endures, KFF Health News
• Lykos Therapeutics cuts 75% of staff after FDA rejects MDMA-assisted therapy, STAT
• Operating the perfect cooling center is harder than it looks, Bloomberg
• The fight against DEI programs shifts to medical care, Wall Street Journal
• Gilead must be held accountable for the harm caused by ‘patent hopping’ an HIV treatment, STAT