October 13, 2026

The need-to-know this morning

Johnson & Johnson kicked off the third-quarter pharma earnings season, beating estimates despite a slowdown in medical device sales.
Roche licensed an experimental obesity drug from a Chinese company.
BioNTech said an experimental cancer vaccine failed to delay disease progression in a clinical trial involving patients with metastatic head and neck cancer.

rare disease

Concerns grow over Neurocrine's Prader-Willi drug after patient deaths

Neurocrine Biosciences is under mounting scrutiny over its drug, Vykat XR — the first FDA-approved treatment for the insatiable hunger associated with the rare disease called Prader-Willi syndrome. There have been reports of seven deaths associated with the drug, STAT’s Adam Feuerstein writes, and nearly 100 hospitalizations since its approval 18 months ago. But others argue that the drug is desperately needed and that there is not definitive proof that the treatment caused the deaths.

Among those ringing the alarm is Karen Vogt, a pediatric endocrinologist and former medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration whose teenage son has Prader-Willi.

“In my opinion, all of these deaths are related to Vykat,” Vogt said. “Six of the seven patients died from heart or respiratory failure, the seventh died from a severe brain injury. All of the deaths were precipitated by significant fluid retention or hyperglycemia that are known and concerning side effects of Vykat.”

Neurocrine Biosciences maintains that Vykat represents an important advance for patients and plans to launch an additional safety study early next year.

drug pricing

Hospitals sue Trump again over drug discounts

The American Hospital Association is taking the Trump administration to court — again — over its plan to replace upfront discounts under the federal 340B drug-pricing program with after-the-fact rebates. The latest proposal, set to take effect Jan. 1, would cover 25 widely used, high-cost Medicare drugs, STAT’s Tara Bannow writes. This is up from 10 in an earlier version that was blocked by a federal judge, and then subsequently withdrawn.

The AHA, joined by the Maine Hospital Association and four safety net hospitals, argues that the new model would saddle hospitals with more than $1 billion in annual administrative costs while forcing them to front the full price of drugs as they await rebates. Federal officials estimate the administrative burden at $537 million annually.

“When the government makes a change of this magnitude, it must fully consider what it will mean for the patients and communities that rely on 340B hospitals every day,” AHA CEO Steve Walsh said in a statement.

influence

The hidden costs of pharma lunches

Those free lunches from drugmakers may be costing patients more than doctors realize, STAT’s Ed Silverman writes. A new Cochrane review of 93 studies found that gifts and payments from pharmaceutical companies increased both inappropriate prescribing and also the number of prescriptions written.

Notably, the more meals doctors received from a drugmaker, the more likely they were to prescribe its products — ranging from antidepressants to opioid painkillers. Drugmakers reported $3.28 billion in non-research payments to U.S. prescribers in 2023 alone.

“The risk is not that doctors consciously exchange prescriptions for a free meal but that social relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and doctors become normalized and, as the report says, create an ‘unconscious sense of obligation to reciprocate’ which may contribute to less appropriate, more frequent and more costly prescribing without clinicians experiencing themselves as compromised,” said Piotr Ozieranski, a University of Bath researcher who studies the U.K. drug ecosystem.

executives

Bausch + Lomb CEO Brent Saunders exits again

Brent Saunders is out as CEO of Bausch + Lomb for the second time, less than four years after returning to lead the eye-care company. The departure, described as a mutual agreement with the board, caught Wall Street analysts by surprise, FierceBiotech notes. Thomas Appio, who runs parent company Bausch Health and became Bausch + Lomb’s chairman in August, will serve as interim CEO.

Saunders’ latest tenure was marked by a failed private equity sale, an intraocular lens recall, and a Phase 2 glaucoma drug flop. Its dry eye franchise has grown some though.

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