Weekend Update

David Ermer–Congress, SCOTUS, Telehealth, U.S. Healthcare–

Happy Flag Day.

Both Houses of Congress will be conducting committee and floor business this week. The House had added floor voting days for Thursday and Friday next week as well as all of the following week (except for next Friday which is the work holiday associated with the Fourth of July.)

The Senate Health Eduction Labor and Pensions Committee is holding a committee hearing of relevance to the FEHBP — Telehealth: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic — on June 17 at 10 am.

The Supreme Court has nineteen more opinions to release before its summer break. This week the Court is releasing opinions tomorrow and Thursday, both days at 10 am ET.

Here are a couple of non-COVID-19 research items that caught the FEHBlog’s attention over the weekend:

  • Precision Vaccinations reports that “With a surprisingly simple approach in which cancer cells are first grown, ruptured and converted into nanoparticles, and then used as a vaccine, Vanderbilt University researchers say they have developed what appears to be a promising treatment for breast cancer metastasis. Metastasis is the last stage of cancer, responsible for about 90 percent of cancer-related deaths.
  • The Wall Street Journal reports that

Scientists may be just a few years away from delivering new treatments for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of irreversible vision loss in people more than 50 years old.

Over the past 15 years there has been only one class of successful AMD drugs, known as anti-VEGF agents, and they have worked for a minority of AMD sufferers. Now researchers are having success fighting AMD from new directions. They include an immune-system inhibitor and stem-cell therapy, which show promise for treating the dry form of AMD in its advanced stage, for which there is currently no treatment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that we will have markedly improved treatments for both wet and dry AMD within two to three years,” says Joshua Dunaief, professor of ophthalmology at the Scheie Eye Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.