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Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here. Good morning. A woman undergoing a four-hour deep brain stimulation procedure played clarinet continuously to help the surgeon “fine tune” the electrodes in her brain. What a pun. Advertisement 420 That’s about how many anti-science bills have been introduced in statehouses across the country this year. The bills target longstanding public health protections like vaccine mandates, milk safety, and fluoride as part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. An AP investigation found that the wave of legislation is normalizing conspiracies fueled by Kennedy and the anti-vaccine movement. Read the story, which includes heartbreaking testimony from the parents of an 8-year-old boy who died from a vaccine-preventable disease this spring. “I thought having the vaccines would protect our children,” said Erik Dahlberg, the boy’s father. “Unfortunately, it did not because other kids, other adults, need to be vaccinated as well.” New legal group aims to protect abortion providers Launched yesterday, a new legal organization called Reproductive Futures aims to serve as “the legal frontline” of abortion care post-Dobbs, with a particular focus on expanding existing shield laws and introducing similar protective measures in new states. The group’s founder, Julie F. Kay, has already had a hand in such work — including in a California law passed last month allowing abortion meds to be mailed without the names of the patient, provider, or pharmacist on the package for privacy protection. Advertisement “The past two years of telemedicine within shield states has caused our lawyers to learn a great deal about the strengths of these laws and the ways they could be strengthened for providers and for patients,” Kay told me over email. The group will not pursue litigation against restrictive states, as several other organizations already engage in such work, Kay said. That frees up Reproductive Futures “to be laser focused on protecting telemedicine abortion, emergency room and post-abortion care and to develop proactive litigation strategies,” she wrote. Some doctors in states with shield laws have already been targeted by restrictive states for providing abortion medication through telemedicine. “None of these cases appear to have a strong legal basis, but they are an attempt to discourage provision of telemedicine from shield states to those in under-resourced communities,” Kay said, adding that Reproductive Futures will offer pro bono legal defense services for telemedicine providers. What’s the difference between neurology and psychiatry? When you hear that somebody’s writing an essay about why we should tear down the wall between neurology and psychiatry, you might expect an academic approach. But in a new First Opinion essay, neurologist and pain physician Shaheen E. Lakhan leads with his own family. “My father’s brain betrayed him,” he writes about a military service-related stroke that left his father paralyzed and able to communicate only through blinking. He goes on to detail other family troubles that, initially, seemed unrelated: his brother’s psychosis, his mother’s dementia, his own migraines. “My experiences taught me what textbooks did not: the way we structure brain care is fundamentally flawed,” Lakhan writes. Medicine should not separate the way we think about the mind from the way we think about the brain, he argues. Read more on how he came to that conclusion and what he believes should come next. Everything you need to know from Europe’s big cancer conference STAT’s Andrew Joseph was on site in Berlin this week leading our coverage of ESMO, hosted by the European Society for Medical Oncology. Here’s some of the biggest news from the event: Advertisement Researchers from the pharmaceutical company Merck presented some showstopping data on the benefits of certain drugs — at one point, cheers and applause broke out during a presentation on a bladder cancer treatment. But these successful sessions also exposed a business tension for the company. Investors are pressuring Merck to answer what comes after Keytruda, its vital, best-selling cancer drug. “It’s not easy to fill a juggernaut-sized hole,” Drew writes. The professional organization also rolled out its first set of guidance on how its members should use large language models, a type of artificial intelligence, in cancer medicine. AI tools used to help track symptoms, make decisions, or offer other administrative supports have a “striking lack of quantitative, empirical evidence” documenting their safety and efficacy, the guidance noted. The authors evaluated tools used by health systems and proposed case-by-case do’s and don’ts. A new study suggests that mRNA-based Covid vaccines might boost the effects of cancer immunotherapy drugs, perhaps by alerting the immune system and helping direct immune cells to attack tumors. Advanced cancer patients who received a vaccine within 100 days before taking an immunotherapy drug during the pandemic lived longer than patients who did not, the study showed. Q&A: Moderna forges ahead with cancer care In other cancer news from Drew: It’s been a tough financial year for Moderna. Its share price is down, it’s been cutting costs and laying off staff, and the Trump administration has turned against its core mRNA technology. And just yesterday, the company announced its experimental vaccine for cytomegalovirus failed in a Phase 3 trial. Despite all that, the company is still quietly moving forward with its pipeline, including cancer and rare disease therapeutics. “We’re pretty bullish on how much impact this technology can have in cancer,” Kyle Holen, the company’s head of development for therapeutics and oncology, said to Drew at ESMO. Read more of their conversation for how the company’s oncology programs are faring amid the cost-cutting and how discussions with the FDA this year have gone. What we’re reading
