From Washington DC —

• The Secretary of Health and Human Services issued a statement on the end of the Covid health emergency which occurred today.
  • Govexec and the Society for Human Resource Management respectively discuss the impact of this event on federal agencies and employers generally.
    • SHRM notes, “President Biden in April ended the pandemic national emergency weeks earlier than expected—but the premature ending won’t shift the deadlines spelled out in the administration’s guidance from March, including the extended deadline for special enrollment in health plans. * * * July 10 will also mark the end of some COBRA-related relief, under which employees were allowed extra time to pay their COBRA premiums or to decide whether they wanted to use the coverage.”

• The Wall Street Journal reports
  • “A highly anticipated meeting scheduled for Friday between President Biden and congressional leaders to chart a path forward on lifting the debt ceiling was postponed until next week, officials said.
  • “The delay will give White House and congressional staff more time to make progress in their closed-door spending talks, the officials said, adding that one of the lawmakers was unable to attend the meeting Friday because of a scheduling conflict.

• STAT News informs us
  • “The Senate health committee on Thursday passed a package of bills aimed at speeding generic drug competition and reining in drug middlemen business practices. But they failed to pass an ambitious reform to the pharmacy benefit manager sector, despite strong bipartisan support for it.
  • “Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is pursuing the drug pricing reforms at the behest of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who wants to hold a floor vote on an even bigger package of health bills later this year. The markup came just a day after the same panel held a major hearing on PBM and drugmakers’ role in high insulin prices.
  • “It’s not clear when the Senate would take up that package, and while the package is bipartisan, it’s not clear whether it has enough support among House Republicans to pass in that chamber. There are a few, tamer PBM bills that the House Energy and Commerce Committee is expected to mark up on May 17, but there is no indication that Senate and House lawmakers are coordinating on PBM legislation.
  • “The committee passed 18 to 3 a bill that would ban PBMs from using so-called spread pricing. It would also require that the middlemen disclose rebates, fees, and other payments they receive and to pass them on to the insurers for whom they negotiate those concessions. * * * The committee included an amendment from Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), that would let patients appeal insurer decisions to make them try cheaper drugs before getting more expensive drugs.”

From the public health front, Healio tells us that “Overweight and obese BMI during adulthood appeared associated with increased risk for colorectal cancer and non colorectal gastrointestinal cancers, according to study results published in JAMA Network Open.” The FEHBlog does not think that the new generation of obesity-reduction drugs needs publicity, but there you go.

From the Rx coverage and more front, the FDA announced

• “the supplemental approval of Rexulti (brexpiprazole) oral tablets for the treatment of agitation associated with dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. This is the first FDA-approved treatment option for this indication.”
  • Medpage Today adds, “Brexpiprazole’s labelopens in a new tab or window will continue to carry a boxed warning about the risk of increased mortality in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis treated with antipsychotic drugs. The warning further stipulates that the drug is not approved for patients with dementia-related psychosis who are not experiencing agitation associated with Alzheimer’s dementia.”
• and “finalized recommendations for assessing blood donor eligibility using a set of individual risk-based questions to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV. These questions will be the same for every donor, regardless of sexual orientation, sex or gender. Blood establishments may now implement these recommendations by revising their donor history questionnaires and procedures.”

• Beckers Hospital Review points out “The Biden administration has been taking action to address the prescription drug supply shortage, which has caused upheaval both for patients and providers, according to a May 10 Bloomberg report.”

From the medical research front —

• STAT News reports
  • “Home to billions of cells that form trillions of connections, the human brain isn’t just the body’s most important organ; it’s also the hardest to study. But an international team of scientists using cutting-edge stem cell technology has devised a new way to better understand the brain’s cellular cleanup crew — and its connection to neurological disease.
  • “Researchers coaxed stem cells to grow into microglia, immune cells that roam the brain searching for signs of damage and that monitor and maintain neuronal connections. They then added microglia to brain organoids, tiny 3D structures of neurons that mimic some aspects of brain function, and transplanted these microglia-containing “mini-brains” into mice. Doing so caused microglia to look and behave much more like they would in a human brain compared to previous lab experiments conducted in a dish.
  • “The authors also found early hints that they could use these transplanted organoids to study disease, including the role that microglia might play in autism. Microglia in brain organoids derived from people with autism had larger cell bodies than cells from controls and had an overabundance of small cellular extensions associated with an active, inflammatory state researchers believe may contribute to the disorder.”
  • “The findings, published on Thursday in the journal Cell, are the result of a collaboration between scientists from San Diego to Germany to Israel. The study raises the possibility of using transplanted organoids to understand the complex crosstalk between neurons and immune cells across a range of diseases, and to perhaps one day use this system to test potential treatments.”

• The Washington Post adds
  • “A skin patch being developed by a French pharmaceutical company to treat peanut allergy is showing promise in toddlers, according to a peer-reviewed study published Wednesday.
  • “The “peanut patch” outperformed a placebo in “desensitizing children to peanuts and increasing the peanut dose that triggered allergic symptoms,” said the study, which was funded by the company DBV Technologies and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.”