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Good morning. Today we have Andrew Joseph’s dispatch from a Barcelona hospital that developed its own CAR-T, an intriguing clue to how obesity drugs work in the (mouse) brain, and a win for toothbrushing vs. pneumonia.
Apple pauses sales of latest watches in patent battle
If you had an Apple Watch on your wish list for the holidays this year, you may need to reconsider. To comply with an import ban from the International Trade Commission imposed in October, Apple is pulling Apple Watches with blood oxygen-measuring capabilities — that is, Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 — from its website Thursday and from its stores Sunday. The ITC has ruled that Apple infringed on the patents of pulse oximeter company Masimo. President Biden has until Dec. 25 to approve or veto the import ban, but Apple decided to pause sales first. Older versions of the Apple Watch that track heart rate and physical activity will still be available.
Apple and Masimo have been battling over the pulse oximeter story since 2020, with a mistrial in May and a Masimo-requested retrial that will start in a year. STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence has more.
Weight loss drugs may fight inflammation in the brain, mouse study suggests
A new study in mice looks more closely at why new weight-loss medicines like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound work so well — not just for achieving weight loss, but also for cutting the odds of heart attack and death. There was a clue in that lower cardiovascular risk: the benefits accrued before weight loss took place, likely from lowered inflammation.
The study posted yesterday in Cell Metabolism found that GLP-1-based drugs acted through the brain to reduce inflammation throughout the body, just before the mice lost weight. If this discovery holds up in humans, and if researchers can identify where in the brain these reactions occur, new drugs could aim at those areas, said Daniel Drucker, senior author of the study. “This is a new model for the anti-inflammatory actions of GLP-1 drugs.” STAT’s Elaine Chen explains.
How — and why — a Spanish hospital developed its own CAR-T
More than a decade ago, a team of immunologists and hematologists in Barcelona, Spain, saw the first case reports about CAR-T therapies, in which scientists take a person’s own immune cells and engineer them to root out cancer once reinfused into a patient’s body. That team set out to build their own therapy, rather than rely on what would become brand-name medicines developed by pharma companies. The hospital-grown version won regulatory approval under a special European policy and earned reimbursement from the national health system, at about one-third the list price of Kymriah or Yescarta.
“It’s normally not what we do, academic institutions,” Julio Delgado, a hematologist at Hospital Clínic of Barcelona, told STAT’s Andrew Joseph. “It’s just that we see there are so many patients in the European Union who don’t have access to CAR-T cell products.” Read what’s involved, and where advocates and industry disagree.
Who were the worst biotech CEOs of 2023?
So if choosing yesterday’s best biopharma CEO of 2023 was a slam dunk for David Ricks at Eli Lilly, who gets the nod for worst from STAT’s Adam Feuerstein? That would be Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. The reason is accountability: Strategic missteps, financial miscalculations, and scientific setbacks have plunged Pfizer into a deep crisis. Bourla is the man at the top, so the responsibility lies with him.
But Bourla has an opportunity to turn Pfizer around, Adam notes. The 2024 reset should get an assist from the $43 billion acquisition of cancer drugmaker Seagen. Meanwhile, the rest of the list looks more like the “blockheads and scoundrels” of yesteryear, to use Adam’s term, and then there’s the dumpster. Read more.
Debate is reignited on digital trackers in health care
Trackers — ubiquitous bits of code invisibly embedded in most websites — follow you wherever you go on the internet. That’s why those on-point ads appear, seemingly out of nowhere but actually directly from the pages you visit, the buttons you click, and the forms you fill out. The stakes are higher when that page or button or form involve your sensitive medical information.
We’ve told you about investigations by STAT and The Markup that demonstrated how these trackers can leak sensitive information, including diagnoses and medications, to companies like Meta and Google. Government regulators have stepped in, lawsuits have been filed, and health systems and companies have responded. But another contingent is steeling itself for a fight, arguing that regulators have overstepped their authority and hobbled critical health care infrastructure by targeting trackers. STAT’s Katie Palmer tells us more.
Toothbrushing tied to lower pneumonia rates for seriously ill hospital patients
Imagine this: Preventing the most common infection patients pick up in the hospital might be as simple as brushing their teeth twice a day. A new review in JAMA Internal Medicine analyzed 15 studies of more than 2,700 patients to conclude that hospital-acquired pneumonia rates were lower among patients randomly assigned to receive daily toothbrushing, especially if they were on ventilators to help them breathe. These patients stayed on ventilators for a shorter time, left ICUs faster, and were less likely to die in the ICU than other patients. Length of their hospital stays and the use of antibiotics did not make a difference.
Oral care has always been important in these patients because pneumonia has been connected to the microbes in their mouths that they breathe in. Antiseptics don’t seem to help, so regular toothbrushing was tested. “Oral hygiene could assume an indispensable role akin to hand hygiene in the prevention and control of health care–associated infections,” a companion commentary says.
What we’re reading
- Can AI help you die? Bloomberg
- Biden administration asks judge to toss out Humana’s Medicare Advantage audit lawsuit, STAT
- For the lonely, tech offers friendship – at a price, Washington Post
- A big misconception about the world’s greatest infectious killer, The Atlantic
- Prime Medicine, Mukherjee’s Myeloid Therapeutics clash over genome-editing deal, STAT