Copyright STAT
Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here. Buongiorno STAT readers, it’s been a while! The last time I hosted this newsletter I knew of regular sleep patterns, predictable schedules, a home that didn’t resemble the site of a nuclear disaster. Now I have a toddler, and I’ve traded all of the above for … joy (not only, or course. But a lot of it!). Speaking of, there is a thought-provoking piece about surrogacy in our lineup about which I’d love to hear your opinions. Hit reply, will you? Advertisement ‘I don’t think AI in health care has had its penicillin moment yet’ AI tools designed to make health care more efficient are ubiquitous, though many remain piecemeal and siloed, as researchers struggle to scale them up. Enter Vega Health, a startup designed to help health systems adopt AI technology beyond the ubiquitous documentation tools. Founder Mark Sendak left an academic career at Duke University to pursue this venture. He said he wants to create the “Costco of health care AI,” offering health systems a subscription fee to access to a curated marketplace of AI tools ready to be adopted. It’s an infrastructure designed to meet the “penicillin moment” of health AI, Sendak told STAT’s Casey Ross, when “somebody invents something that rapidly saves millions of lives.” Read more about the technical challenges of such a platform, its business model, and how Vega Health is thinking about the future. Can better regulation solve surrogacy’s ethical challenges? Surrogacy — especially commercial surrogacy — doesn’t have many supporters. An unlikely coalition of religious institutions, feminists, and human rights advocates condemn it wholeheartedly, and a UN rapporteur has labeled it a form of violence against women. Yet, for as many as 17% of infertile women, surrogacy is the only option to have genetically related children. Advertisement There are no shortage of problems with surrogacy — exploitation, coercion, scams, inequality. But a strong regulatory framework can create a more ethical system, New York University ethicist Arthur L. Caplan argues in a new First Opinion essay. For instance, he writes, a system similar to kidney donation could regulate altruistic surrogacy, and stricter disclosures and screenings should be applied to commercial cases. But these interventions need to be made quickly, or else the practice could be entirely banned. Read more. The scientific method turned against science, and an expert’s take on Trump’s drug policies The first Trump administration funded mRNA vaccine development and celebrated its historic success. The second has demonized the technology, canceling a $766 million contract for bird flu vaccines and filling a vaccine advisory board with vaccine and mRNA skeptics. It’s just the beginning, venture capitalist and Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan argued at the STAT Summit in Boston. “The scientific method — where scientists are trained to be constantly skeptical — is being used as an ‘opening,’ he said, for people to come in ‘with zero background, zero hypothesis, and just make s— up.’ Already, he said, people are questioning chemotherapy. They will likely question new breakthrough drugs for other serious diseases,” writes Jason Mast. But not every health innovator agrees with his dire prediction. Read more. Also at the summit: Stephen Taylor, the president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, spoke with Lev Facher about his concerns with the Trump administration’s hardline drug policies, and criticized health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s claims that 12-step recovery programs should be the “gold standard” for opioid addiction recovery — as opposed to medications such as methadone and buprenorphine. Read more about the panel to find out what makes Taylor hopeful about the future of addiction treatment. Biodiversity is as important to health as climate Climate change is officially a public health issue. At COP28 in 2023, more than 150 countries endorsed a declaration on climate and health, and the UN called climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.” But another topic is just as critical for health — one that 200 scientific journals have said should be considered inextricable from climate change: biodiversity. Advertisement Biodiversity is essential for our survival — it inspires drug discovery, provides food, and regulates disease transmission. Yet it hasn’t captured the attention of the health community the way climate change has, write Neil Vora, a physician and senior adviser for One Health at Conservation International and Chris Walzer, a wildlife veterinarian and the executive director of Health at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Read more. California will soon roll out an $11 insulin pen Starting in January 2026, low-cost insulin will make an entrance in the California market. After three years of development, the generic insulin will be made available in packs of five pens for $55 through the CalRx program, launched in 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to provide access to cheaper medications to California residents. The pens will be manufactured by Biocon Biologics using a biosimilar version of insulin glargine, and distributed by nonprofit Civica Rx. The branded version of the product, Sanofi’s Lantus, costs pharmacies upward of $92, reports Ed Silverman, who has details about other drugs coming to CalRx in the future. What we’re reading
