From Washington, DC,
- The House of Representatives and the Senate will be in session this week for Committee business and floor voting this week.
- The Hill reports,
- “Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) predicted on Friday [September 13] that a government shutdown will be avoided as one looms.
- “Do you believe that Republicans will be able to avoid a government shutdown?” NewsNation’s Blake Burman asked Harris on “The Hill.” “And do you think shutdowns are useful tools, or not?”
- “There will not be a government shutdown, you know, one month before an election, that I can tell you,” Harris responded.
- “Lawmakers are racing to avoid a shutdown before the end-of-the-month deadline.”
- Sen. Tim Kaine (D VA) has signed onto a bill as a co-sponsor to mandate FEHB coverage of IVF procedures. The Senate Majority Leader reportedly plans to bring up an IVF mandate bill this coming week.
- The American Medical Association’s public website explains various Medicare payment reform laws for its members.
From the public health and medical research front,
- The AMA points out the top preventive health tips that your internist wants you to know.
- The New York Times identifies “Three Medical Practices That Older Patients Should Question. Some treatments and procedures become routine despite lacking strong evidence to show that they’re beneficial. Recent studies have called a few into question.”
- The Washington Post reports,
- “More than 5 percent of women who get their tubes tied later become pregnant, a new analysis suggests — and researchers say the failure of tubal sterilization procedures, which are widely considered permanent, “may be considerably more common than many expect.”
- “The study, published in NEJM Evidence, used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, which looks at contraception use, pregnancy and birth outcomes among a representative sample of U.S. women aged 15 to 44. The data was assembled during four waves of data collection from about 4,000 women who had tubal ligations between 2002 and 2015. * * *
- “When choosing what birth control will work best for them, people consider many different things, including safety, convenience, and how fast they can start to use the method,” says Eleanor Bimla Schwarz, chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General and the study’s first author, in a news release.
- “This study shows that tubal surgery cannot be considered the best way to prevent pregnancy. People using a contraceptive arm implant, or an IUD are less likely to become pregnant than those who have their tubes tied.”
- “The researchers call for more inquiry into the “real-world effectiveness” of different forms of contraception.”
- STAT News informs us from a Barcelona, Spain, oncology conference held this weekend,
- “An AstraZeneca immunotherapy, given both before and after surgery, improved survival rates in patients with bladder cancer, results that could reshape how muscle-invasive bladder tumors are treated.
- “The regimen using Imfinzi, the company’s anti-PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor, cut the risk of death by 25% compared to treating patients before surgery with chemotherapy alone, researchers reported Sunday. It also lowered the risk of disease recurrence by about a third.
- “It really is offering a curative-intent regimen and improving the cure rate in the disease,” Susan Galbraith, AstraZeneca’s head of oncology R&D, told STAT at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Barcelona, using the word “transformative” several times. The results of the Phase 3 NIAGARA trial were presented in a presidential session at the conference and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- “Galbraith said the company would talk with regulators about the data, but experts will be watching to see if an ongoing debate about clinical trial design could pose a problem in this case.”
- and
- “Patients with advanced cancers often develop a secondary condition that causes them to shed weight, making it even harder to tolerate their cancer treatments. Called cachexia, it’s an under-recognized syndrome that researchers are still trying to tease out, and one that’s attracting more interest from drugmakers.
- “On Saturday, Pfizer reported that an experimental antibody not only helped cancer patients with cachexia regain some weight versus placebo, but that it also seemed to increase their muscle mass and activity levels, signaling that the added weight translated into meaningful benefits.”
- and
- “A targeted immunotherapy being developed by the biotech iTeos Therapeutics and GSK delivered promising response rates in patients with a type of lung cancer, propelling the treatment into a pivotal Phase 3 trial and adding fuel to a broader debate about the validity of the target.
- “The companies reported on Saturday that their combination of a TIGIT-targeting antibody and GSK’s Jemperli increased the percentage of patients who saw their tumors shrink versus those who received Jemperli alone, meeting the goals of the Phase 2 trial and the expectations that analysts had set for the study to be considered a success.”
From the U.S. healthcare business front,
- Healthcare Dive tells us,
- “Health systems are a large market for artificial intelligence startups, but companies selling to insurers or life sciences firms create value more quickly, according to an analysis by venture capital firm Flare Capital Partners.
- “Most AI startups selling their products to health systems haven’t progressed past early-stage investment rounds. Just over 5% of those companies have reached a Series C raise or later, compared with nearly 10% of startups in life sciences and about 16% of companies selling to health plans.
- “The gap suggests AI startups in the life sciences and health plan markets have been able to create more value for their customers, according to Flare. But those sectors also have higher operating margins and can likely devote more resources — and time — to scale AI products.”\
- McKinsey and Company consider “five trends shaping the health and wellness space.”