Phar­ma trade groups are lay­ing the foun­da­tion for po­ten­tial le­gal chal­lenges to two CMS pric­ing demon­stra­tions that they say are much broad­er than legal­ly al­lowed and aren't ac­tu­al­ly in­tend­ed to save pa­tients mon­ey.

The re­bukes were out­lined in pub­lic com­ments from the trade groups BIO and PhRMA on two yet-to-be-fi­nal­ized demos re­leased by the Cen­ter for Medicare and Med­ic­aid In­no­va­tion that aim to low­er drug prices for Medicare Part B and Part D, re­spec­tive­ly. The de­mo ad­dress­ing Part B is called GLOBE and the Part D de­mo is called GUARD.

No­vo Nordisk said that start­ing next year, it will low­er the list price of its pop­u­lar GLP-1 prod­ucts to $675 per month in a cost-cut­ting ef­fort fo­cused on pa­tients with high in­sur­ance de­ductibles or co­pays.

The cuts come as No­vo Nordisk con­tin­ues to grap­ple with pres­sure from com­pounders pro­duc­ing their own, of­ten cheap­er, ver­sions of its block­buster weight loss prod­ucts. The com­pa­ny an­nounced on Tues­day that its lat­est move will make it “eas­i­er and more af­ford­able” to get “au­then­tic” We­govy and Ozem­pic.

The new price will be about half of We­govy’s cur­rent list price of $1,350 per pack­age. Ozem­pic and Ry­bel­sus cur­rent­ly cost about $1,028 per month. A drug’s list price is rarely what a pa­tient ac­tu­al­ly pays out of pock­et, and doesn’t re­flect re­bates or dis­counts paid to in­sur­ers or phar­ma­cy ben­e­fit man­agers.

The fed­er­al agency tasked with speed­ing bio­med­ical break­throughs, ARPA-H, is promis­ing as much as $144 mil­lion to sev­en teams to study mark­ers of ag­ing and test whether ex­ist­ing and ex­per­i­men­tal treat­ments can "im­prove ag­ing out­comes.”

The an­ti-ag­ing project is known as PROSPR and was start­ed in 2024 un­der the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion. But longevi­ty and an­ti-ag­ing are key in­ter­ests of HHS Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MA­HA move­ment, and new ARPA-H Di­rec­tor Ali­cia Jack­son, who was ap­point­ed late last year, has al­so ex­pressed in­ter­est in re­vers­ing ag­ing.

The awards an­nounced Tues­day to­tal as much as $144 mil­lion over five years across three biotech com­pa­nies and four uni­ver­si­ties.

Bloom Sci­ence be­lieves it has stum­bled on a new ap­proach to weight loss: a pill con­tain­ing two strains of bac­te­ria that al­ter the gut mi­cro­bio­me to repli&sh