GLP-1

What to know about Trump's weight loss drug deals

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The Trump administration wants to make it easier for Americans to afford popular anti-obesity drugs made by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, announcing Thursday a deal to offer more coverage for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries and lower prices across the board.

The most popular drugs, Wegovy and Zepbound, carry list prices of around $1,000 a month, and are available directly from the drugmakers without insurance for about $500.

The agreements could be a substantial political boon for the president’s health care agenda, an issue where Democrats have long held the upper hand. If millions more Americans get access to these expensive drugs, it could improve public health by reducing obesity — and the many diseases linked to it — as well as potentially improve cardiovascular and mental health, according to early data. 

We’ve got every angle of this story covered for you:

• The deal’s details, including how cheap the companies have agreed to sell their weight loss treatments.
• What the deal portends for Lilly and Novo, Medicare, telehealth, Americans’ health, and more.
• Why health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime pharma critic, wholeheartedly endorsed the deal — and how MAHA folks felt about it.

DRUGS

New FDA priority vouchers, who dis?

The next round of Food and Drug Administration priority review vouchers has arrived. Like the FDA’s first batch of vouchers, these new drugs are also tied to broader policy efforts, and include weight loss drugs from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.

Six drugs were granted a “Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher” from the FDA, which guarantees speedier reviews of drug candidates aligned with U.S. priorities. The program is part of the administration’s broader effort to get medications to Americans faster, and at cheaper prices, than in the past.

The criteria for receiving a voucher are very broad, and agency watchdogs have worried that the program may primarily be a way to hand out political favors rather than advance public health. Read more from STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence.

SCIENCE

Brain organoid advances lead to calls for increased oversight

A decade after the first human neural organoids sparked into existence, the intense ethical debate over their usage has reached a fever pitch, prompting leading scientists and bioethicists to call for the establishment of an international body to monitor advances and provide ethical and policy guidance.

What began as clumps of self-organizing cells shuffling around petri dishes have been coaxed into increasing levels of complexity to mimic severe psychiatric and neurological diseases including schizophrenia, autism, and Alzheimer’s. The field has come so far that the NIH recently announced $87 million to establish a new center dedicated to standardizing organoid research. The agency will need organoids if it wants to abide by an earlier pledge to replace testing on mice, primates, and other animals. 

But the rapid pace of progress has not been without issue, as STAT’s Megan Molteni writes. Read on for the devil in the details.