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Tag: Pharma

  • What Life Sciences Commercial Teams Can Learn from Digital Health

    What Life Sciences Commercial Teams Can Learn from Digital Health

    A cursory glance across job descriptions at most major pharmaceutical companies will, if one is being unkind, look essentially identical to the 2010s: the same divisional divide of analytics, field, launch, CRM, and content, to name just a few, with essential requirements listing a relevant degree and a set number of years in the subdivision. Meanwhile, AI threatens to upend the commercial ecosystem as we know it, if we let it. There’s no shortage of investment in commercial AI: budgets exist, and pilots launch.  What’s missing is a redefinition of the realm of commercial possibility. R&D teams talk about AI in terms of what’s possible, where Commercial teams mostly talk about it in terms of what’s faster: faster call planning, faster reporting, faster content approval. In the pharmaceutical industry, we’re not pondering what the Commercial function could become, only what it could do quicker. I believe that the pharmaceutical industry could learn several vital lessons from the digital health teams they are so frequently adjacent to, or in partnerships with.

    Today

    As it stands, commercial teams still remain largely siloed, despite a decades-long effort to the contrary: the SWAT teams who swoop in for launch, the marketing teams who focus on a “360-degree view of the customer” and pore over agency data on tactic performance, the sales teams who battle daily for two to five minutes with target HCPs, the digital teams optimizing Veeva or Salesforce and wrangling unwieldy data, and the market access teams negotiating, lobbying, and analyzing. Each function is a separate thread in the complex ball of yarn that is a Commercial team in 2026.  Each trying to grapple with the pace of change driven by AI for specific, single threaded needs. For example, a rep getting handed a new “AI-driven next best action” tool but it’s bolted onto the same static quarterly system that existed before, and doesn’t address any fundamental underlying model improvements.

    Opportunities for Pharma

    The real question: if we designed a pharma commercial function from scratch today, would it look anything like this? My hypothesis is no, and that it would look much closer to the world of digital health.

    Digital health and Pharma remain distant cousins in the family tree of life sciences and health. Where digital health can focus on specific interventions and inventions, Pharma, Big Pharma at least, has the unenviable task of spreading its approach across indications, therapeutic areas, and ultimately entire patient and HCP populations. The result is that digital health companies have grown up leaner, with commercial functions built as a specific, consolidated, and usually much smaller function than in pharma. 

    What pharma commercial could borrow from digital health isn’t complicated or novel, but it isn’t obvious in the day to day of a big pharma juggernaut. I once heard that in the beginning days of the internet, the NY Times typed in the full newspaper – just digitizing the physical copy. This is an exact analogy for how most of big pharma is using agentic AI now: focused on re-creation of existing ways of working and increasing efficiencies.  

    The less obvious side to the speed and efficiency coin is the idea of changing the actual operating rhythm of the portfolio: shipping concepts to production in days rather than months or years. A digital health team ships a feature in weeks based on a usage pattern; a pharma commercial team can spend a quarter just getting requirements gathered. Or radical focus: a digital health commercial function is built around a handful of clear outcomes, not a dozen sub-functions each optimizing their own area. Pairing radical focus with pharma’s strength in regulatory & compliance creates the opportunity to expedite patient outcomes in a way before unseen. Finally, digital health companies build with partners from day one because they have to, while pharma often plans in-house first and partner only once internal options are exhausted, organizational fatigue has taken grip, or the “build” is ready to get going.

    Making It a reality

    What would it look like if Pharma embraced a digital health style way of working? Potentially, it would be by replacing the sprawl of sub-divisional dashboards and systems with one shared data layer, a single source of truth on HCP engagement, patient journeys, tactic performance, and pipeline, with access rights layered on top rather than entirely separate systems per function. Instead of a field force, maybe it’s a cognitive command center AI that operates across functions instead of within one, flagging a stalled account to market access, content, and the field team simultaneously instead of routing sequentially through three approval chains. And rethinking the field model itself: rather than dispersing reps to chase five-minute HCP windows on a static cycle, that same investment could fund fewer, richer touchpoints, twice-yearly events, and deeper partnerships with different, AI native platforms with distribution & reach like OpenEvidence that HCPs are already choosing to use on their own terms.

    None of this requires more commercial budget than pharma is already spending. It requires spending it on reimagining commercial as a function instead of speeding up an existing function. Digital health and pharma have plenty to learn from, and with, each other, and AI is the first real forcing function either industry has had to do it. The Pharma commercial teams that treat this as a chance to redesign the model, not just streamline it, will be the ones that change what’s possible for HCPs and patients. The remainder will only benefit from greater day to day efficiency.

    Source: champpixs, Getty Images

    Suzy Jackson

    Suzy Jackson is a Digital Health & Commercial Pharma subject matter expert and former Digital Health Chief Commercial Officer at RVO Health, as well as former Head of the North America Life Sciences Commercial Consulting team at Accenture. Suzy’s independent advisory focuses on Commercial technology, strategy, Go-To-Market efforts, market entry, partnership shaping, and competitive analysis across Pharma and Consumer Health. Outside of her advisory work, Suzy is an avid scuba diver, traveler, and sits on the Boards of two non-profits focused on women’s rights, legal advocacy, and survivorship from trauma and abuse.

    This post appears through the MedCity Influencers program. Anyone can publish their perspective on business and innovation in healthcare on MedCity News through MedCity Influencers. Click here to find out how.

  • STAT+: Roche goes beyond licensing in deal with Chinese biotech

    STAT+: Roche goes beyond licensing in deal with Chinese biotech

    DOJ signals it will start scrutinizing drugmakers, PhrMA sues Trump administration, and more biotech news

    gantenerumab Alzheimer's disease Roche
    Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images

    Elaine’s stories explore the boom in new obesity treatments, new drug payment models, the ways companies are affected by FDA changes, and the emerging psychedelics drug sector. She co-writes The Readout newsletter, and co-hosts STAT’s weekly biotech podcast, The Readout Loud. You can reach Elaine on Signal at elaineywchen.70.

    Want to stay on top of the science and politics driving biotech today? Sign up to get our biotech newsletter in your inbox.

    Good morning. Let’s get straight to the news.

    The need-to-know this morning

    Roche goes beyond licensing in deal with Chinese biotech

    Over the past few years, pharma companies have flocked to China to license existing drug candidates. Roche is taking a new approach, partnering with Chinese startup Defand Therapeutics to discover new medicines.

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    1. National Biotech Reporter

      Elaine’s stories explore the boom in new obesity treatments, new drug payment models, the ways companies are affected by FDA changes, and the emerging psychedelics drug sector. She co-writes The Readout newsletter, and co-hosts STAT’s weekly biotech podcast, The Readout Loud. You can reach Elaine on Signal at elaineywchen.70.

  • STAT+: Roche inks drug discovery deal with Chinese biotech, focused on molecular glue medicines

    STAT+: Roche inks drug discovery deal with Chinese biotech, focused on molecular glue medicines

    Allison covers what hot startups are getting up to, and who’s financing them. She is also co-host of the weekly biotech podcast, “The Readout Loud.” You can reach Allison on Signal at AllisonDeAngelis.01.

    Roche is digging deeper into the biotech industry in China, striking a new partnership with a drug startup there. But rather than licensing the startup’s clinical-stage medicines, Roche is enlisting it to discover new ones, signaling a potential shift in global drug development. 

    Chinese startup Defand Therapeutics said Thursday that it had signed a collaboration deal with Roche to develop molecular glue medicines. Under the deal, Defand will discover and develop multiple drugs for cancer and immune-driven diseases. The financial terms were not disclosed, but a source with knowledge of the agreement said it could be worth close to $1 billion between the upfront fee and payments Defand could get if it meets various preclinical, clinical, and regulatory goals. 

    Molecular glue therapies are a buzzy new area of drug development, designed to create a sticky, more effective connection onto problematic proteins to destroy them. Development of these drugs has just begun to accelerate, thanks in large part to the data from Revolution Medicines, showing its molecular glue treatment Rasonque nearly doubled the survival rate of patients with pancreatic cancer. 

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  • STAT+: Biotech companies are struggling to navigate Trump’s new tariffs

    STAT+: Biotech companies are struggling to navigate Trump’s new tariffs

    WASHINGTON — A broad tariff on imported pharmaceuticals took effect at the end of September, and some biopharma companies and the industry group that represents them say many are being left in the dark on how to get exemptions. 

    The Trump administration announced a 100% section 232 tariff in April, impacting imports of patented drugs and their active ingredients. At the time, the White House offered a number of pathways for companies to reduce their tariff burden, including striking a most-favored nation deal to sell drugs in the U.S. at similar prices to other wealthy countries or agreeing to bring production to the U.S.

    Companies that made MFN agreements would have had start paying tariff costs in July, but now aren’t on the hook for payment until early 2029, per their agreements. That exempts many of the biggest U.S. drugmakers, while leaving smaller biotech firms to face the levies.

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  • Opinion: How CMS plans to fix a major flaw in the 340B drug discount program

    Opinion: How CMS plans to fix a major flaw in the 340B drug discount program

    By Casey B. Mulligan

    Oct. 8, 2026

    Mulligan is the chief economist and chief regulatory officer at HHS.

    Some Medicare patients owe more in coinsurance than the hospital paid for their drug. That arithmetic sounds impossible. It is a consequence of the 340B drug discount program and Medicare’s payment formula. Now the Department of Health and Human Services, where I work, is proposing to narrow that gap.

    Congress created the 340B drug discount program in 1992 to financially support safety net hospitals that serve low-income patients. Drug manufacturers must give them steep discounts. But Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurers generally reimburse them at the full amount, allowing these hospitals to keep the spread above the discounted purchasing costs.

    A new report from the Department of Health and Human Services shows other unintended consequences of this well-intended program. The spread grows with the price of the drug. It therefore rewards hospitals for using more and costlier drugs and makes physician practices and infusion clinics more valuable after a 340B hospital acquires them. The patient’s treatment needn’t change. The owner and billing site do.

    The 340B program has exploded: Eligible drug purchases rose from $12 billion in 2015 to $81 billion in 2024, mostly at hospitals, as shown in the report. Those purchases are now larger than net Medicare Part B and Medicaid drug spending overall and, among public prescription drug programs, are smaller only than Medicare Part D.

    A 340B hospital that buys another hospital or a physician practice can register more off-campus clinics and contract pharmacies and capture more spread. Hospital off-campus clinic sites grew from about 7,000 in 2013 to more than 34,000 in 2023, often in neighborhoods that are wealthier and better-insured than that of the parent hospital. Contract pharmacies grew from roughly 1,300 in 2010 to more than 31,000 by mid-2026, dominated by the largest chains.

    With greater bargaining power after acquisitions, hospital systems can negotiate higher commercial prices for health care services, which can in turn raise premiums. Newly acquired hospital outpatient sites can also add facility fees to non-drug services. The effects of 340B show up as larger, more expensive hospital systems and a bigger bill for patients, employers, and taxpayers. The program’s ripple effects contribute to the broader problems facing the U.S. health care system.

    Medicare payment for Part B drugs is typically based on average sales price (ASP). Beginning in 2018, the first Trump administration narrowed the spread in Medicare by paying hospitals for 340B drugs’ ASP minus 22.5% rather than the usual statutory standard of ASP plus 6%, based on an earlier estimate of their average minimum discount.

    Overall outpatient drug payments rose nearly 15% a year from 2015 through 2017. Once the lower rate was fully in effect, inflation-adjusted payments largely plateaued. Payments for the affected 340B drugs held near $7 billion from 2019 through 2021. It is clear that Medicare payment policy influences outpatient drug spending.

    The Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that HHS couldn’t vary payment rates by hospital group without first conducting the acquisition-cost survey required by statute. The court didn’t find that hospitals were economically entitled to the markup. It found that HHS lacked a procedural prerequisite. After the lower rate ended and ASP plus 6% returned for these drugs, annual payments for the affected drugs rose from $7.1 billion in 2021 to $10.7 billion in 2023 — a $3.6 billion increase. Overall outpatient drug payments rose from $14.3 billion in 2021 to $17.6 billion in 2023.

    Restoring the higher rate meant paying hospitals more for the same drugs. The $3.6 billion increase combines that direct payment effect with induced changes in hospitals’ dispensing quantities and drug manufacturers’ underlying prices. The larger spread also strengthens hospitals’ incentive to choose costlier drugs and move treatment into 340B billing sites.

    Off-campus hospital departments benefited too. From 2021 to 2023, payments for their affected 340B drugs rose about $800 million even as claims fell and the number of beneficiaries remained similar. Although these amounts do not tell us how many practices hospitals acquired because of the markup, they indicate the additional financial incentives for acquisitions.

    On April 18, 2025, President Trump directed HHS to obtain the cost information the statute requires. CMS surveyed hospitals from January through April 2026 and has proposed paying for affected 340B drugs at ASP minus 33.4% in 2027. CMS estimates that Medicare drug payments would fall by $4.55 billion in the first year and beneficiary drug copayments by $1.15 billion.

    For a drug with an ASP of $1,000, a beneficiary’s standard 20% coinsurance would fall from $212 to $133.20. The prescription hasn’t changed. The patient’s share of the hospital’s bill has. Narrowing the spread also weakens the incentive to steer patients toward costlier drugs and to acquire physician practices and infusion clinics — the very behaviors that have made care more expensive.

    There’s an important lesson here. A small, well-intended discount for safety net hospitals became a large institutional subsidy with expensive unintended consequences. Under the proposed rule, hospitals would still receive their 340B drug discounts. What would change is Medicare’s payment for those drugs at affected hospitals. Congress provided for a survey of hospitals’ acquisition costs, and CMS says its proposed rate would “more accurately align Medicare payments with hospital drug acquisition costs.”

    Medicare patients should not pay coinsurance as though the discount did not exist.

    Casey B. Mulligan is the chief economist and chief regulatory officer at HHS.

  • Caribou Bio’s Journey With Off-the-Shelf Cell Therapy Reaches the End of the Road

    Caribou Bio’s Journey With Off-the-Shelf Cell Therapy Reaches the End of the Road

    Caribou Biosciences has an off-the-shelf cell therapy with encouraging clinical data to date and agreement with the FDA on the design of a pivotal study in advanced cases of a difficult-to-treat blood cancer. What the company doesn’t have is the capital for that Phase 3 clinical trial.

    Given the financial challenges, Caribou is stopping work on that program and a second one — its only remaining therapeutic candidates. The discontinuations announced after Tuesday’s market close will lead to job and spending cuts as the Berkeley, California-based biotech explores “strategic alternatives” that it said could include a merger, acquisition, or sale of its assets.

    “The Board took these actions in view of the current financing environment for allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies, which has made it increasingly challenging to secure the capital necessary to responsibly advance the Company’s allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy programs,” the company said in a Tuesday regulatory filing.

    Caribou’s allogeneic cell therapies are made by engineering immune cells sourced from healthy donors. The engineering is done with CRISPR technology; Caribou was co-founded by Jennifer Doudna, the scientist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her CRISPR discoveries. The off-the-shelf approach of allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies was intended to offer manufacturing and therapeutic advantages over first-generation CAR-T drugs, autologous therapies made by harvesting and engineering a patient’s own T cells.

    Caribou’s Phase 3-ready therapeutic candidate, vispacabtagene regedleucel (vispa-cel), is an allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy developed to treat relapsed or refractory cases of B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It’s engineered in a way that enhances its activity and limits exhaustion of the cell therapy, which is a problem for autologous CAR-T therapies. The second discontinued Caribou program is CB-011, which is designed to target the protein BCMA to treat relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.

    Autologous therapies use a patient’s own T cells, but these cells have diminished fitness and function from fighting cancer and enduring earlier lines of treatment that damages them. By contrast, allogeneic therapies start with healthy immune cells from healthy donors, which could lead to better outcomes. But one of the key challenges facing all allogeneic cell therapy developers is achieving the same or better durability as autologous cell therapies. Caribou’s discontinuations mean the company won’t have the opportunity to show its therapies can offer these advantages.

    In a research note, Leerink Partners analyst Daina Graybosch noted that Caribou’s announcement came on the heels of AbbVie reporting its T cell engager (TCE), Epkinly, succeeded in a Phase 3 test as a first-line treatment for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Graybosch said that in a world where TCEs are becoming entrenched as first-line treatments for these cancers, there’s still a place for allogeneic cell therapies for patients who need it after a TCE.

    “This view is grounded in the real-world observation that autologous CAR-T efficacy can become compromised in patients who received prior TCE, potentially due to reduced fitness of the patient-derived starting cell product material,” she said. “By delivering an allo-CAR-T derived from a healthy donor cell source, the modality can sidestep this mechanistic liability.”

    Graybosch said investors who appreciate Caribou’s approach might be interested in the clinical-stage allogeneic CAR-T programs of Fate Therapeutics and AvenCell Therapeutics.

    Caribou was founded in 2011 and went public a decade later, raising $304 million in an upsized IPO. At the time, vispa-cel (then known as CB-010) and CB-011 were in early clinical development. Despite the strong investor interest in the IPO, the company has since weathered financial and competitive challenges. While allogeneic cell therapies would offer manufacturing advantages compared to autologous therapies, biopharma companies and investors are increasingly turning their focus to in vivo cell therapies with much less manufacturing cost and complexity.

    Caribou is now implementing its third restructuring in the past three years. In 2024, the company discontinued a preclinical natural killer cell therapy program in order to extend its cash runway. Last year, Caribou cut deeper by discontinuing a program for lupus and another one for acute myeloid leukemia, both in Phase 1 development. The company also cut its preclinical research, leaving only vispa-cell and CB-011 in the pipeline.

    As of February, Caribou’s headcount was 97, according to the company’s annual report. In its second quarter 2026 financial report, Caribou said its cash position was $113.8 million.

    Caribou’s board of directors approved the current restructuring last Friday, the company said in the regulatory filing. The “substantial reduction” of the workforce will take place in the current quarter, leaving a limited number of employees to complete the strategic alternatives process and wind down the business. Expenses related to the restructuring will be between $15 million and $19 million.

    Photo by Flickr user Thomas via a Creative Commons license

  • STAT+: PhRMA sues over Trump policy mandating lower drug prices in Medicare

    STAT+: PhRMA sues over Trump policy mandating lower drug prices in Medicare

    Pilot program known as GLOBE is intended to test ‘most-favored nation’ policy

    Close up stock news photo of medicare advantage membership cards
    Jenny Kane/AP

    By John Wilkerson

    Oct. 7, 2026

    John Wilkerson, a Washington correspondent, is the author of D.C. Diagnosis, a twice-weekly newsletter about the politics and policy of health and medicine.

    John writes about the politics of health care, and he is the author of the twice-weekly D.C. Diagnosis newsletter. You can reach John on Signal at John_Wilkerson.07.

    WASHINGTON — The brand drug industry’s main trade group is suing the Trump administration over a pilot program tying Medicare drug prices to those in peer countries.

    The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said Wednesday that it had filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asserting that the “most-favored nation” pilot in Medicare Part B exceeds Medicare’s statutory authority. 

    The pilot, called GLOBE, is not expected to have much impact because the administration exempted all but a handful of companies in return for their agreement to voluntary deals to charge Medicaid MFN prices. 

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    1. John writes about the politics of health care, and he is the author of the twice-weekly D.C. Diagnosis newsletter. You can reach John on Signal at John_Wilkerson.07.

  • STAT+: Forbion raises $2.6 billion, its largest fundraise to date

    STAT+: Forbion raises $2.6 billion, its largest fundraise to date

    Promising Duchenne therapies will test FDA flexibility, Doudna-founded Caribou shutting down, and more biotech news

    Small people stand on a giant hundred-dollar bill
    Adobe

    Elaine’s stories explore the boom in new obesity treatments, new drug payment models, the ways companies are affected by FDA changes, and the emerging psychedelics drug sector. She co-writes The Readout newsletter, and co-hosts STAT’s weekly biotech podcast, The Readout Loud. You can reach Elaine on Signal at elaineywchen.70.

    Want to stay on top of the science and politics driving biotech today? Sign up to get our biotech newsletter in your inbox.

    Good morning. Today, STAT released our 2026 Wunderkinds, a group of early-career researchers recognized for doing innovative work in health and medicine. I had the pleasure of speaking with one NIH researcher who has been figuring out how GLP-1 drugs work in the brain. But check out all of the profiles here!

    The need-to-know this morning

    • Cerevance said its experimental pill solengepras reduced Parkinson’s patients’ daily off-time, alongside other symptoms, in a Phase 3 trial. The privately held company, which will now talk to regulators about a potential approval, touts the pill as one of the first potential Parkinson’s drugs that does not act directly on dopamine, sparing patients certain side effects.
    • Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai were awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering how to manipulate “mirror image” molecules, paving the way for manufacturing more precise and safer drugs.

    Doudna-founded Caribou is shutting down

    Caribou Biosciences is shutting down after failing to raise enough money to fund a late-stage clinical trial of its off-the-shelf CAR-T therapy for lymphoma.

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    1. National Biotech Reporter

      Elaine’s stories explore the boom in new obesity treatments, new drug payment models, the ways companies are affected by FDA changes, and the emerging psychedelics drug sector. She co-writes The Readout newsletter, and co-hosts STAT’s weekly biotech podcast, The Readout Loud. You can reach Elaine on Signal at elaineywchen.70.

  • From Distributor to Disruptor: Amazon’s Healthcare Flex

    From Distributor to Disruptor: Amazon’s Healthcare Flex

    Could this be Big Tech’s ultimate healthcare flex? For years, Amazon’s ambitions in this $4 trillion market were focused on distribution: acquire a pharmacy here, a primary care network there, and offer convenience.

    But more recently, rather than deploying capital to expand its fulfillment engine, Amazon exercised its cloud and AI muscle to launch tools that enable it to be a “front door” for consumers and patients. From the looks of it, the e-commerce giant has shifted, from competing for a piece of the healthcare journey to collapsing the entire journey into one company.

    In any case, pharma commercialization teams may need to think about Amazon less as a new distributor and more as a disruptor of how patients, prescribers, and payers connect.

    Analyzing the moves

    Big Tech has upended many industries, but the highly regulated and complex healthcare industry has seemed impervious to their influence. Judging by Amazon’s most recent forays, however, this sector may not represent an innovator’s “white whale” for much longer.

    Amazon has closed the “last mile” between writing a prescription and filling it. At One Medical clinics (Amazon’s primary care venture), pharmacy kiosks now let a patient walk out of an appointment with medication in hand, filled by the same company that just diagnosed them. Its oral GLP-1 management program, a recently introduced offering, takes this even further. 

    This year, One Medical also launched an AI-enabled assistant, with access to test results, medical history, and more. The AI agent, dubbed Health AI, can help book medical appointments or provide medical information, such as an explanation of lab results. This clearly strengthens One Medical’s abilities as a provider and can help in enhancing the patient experience all the way through drug dispensing.

    More critically to pharma, Amazon’s Health AI also automatically applies manufacturer coupons and copay assistance programs for eligible patients. On the HCP side, Amazon’s integration with DoseSpot and eNavvi places patient net out-of-pocket at the point of prescribing.

    Health AI subsequently moved beyond the One Medical app, embedding directly into Amazon.com and its mobile app, marking the first time the tool has been available at scale to general consumers, and further enmeshing the patient experience into the overall Amazon environment. These offerings are available to anyone, regardless of being a One Medical member.

    4 potential shake-ups

    The result: Screening, prescribing, fulfillment, and ongoing renewal all happen inside one Amazon-run loop. No outside touchpoint is required.

    That loop doesn’t just change where a patient enters the system and picks up a prescription. It changes the nature of a healthcare “provider,” how care is delivered (including drug fulfillment), and who sees the full picture of a patient’s care. 

    In other words, this shift isn’t just a single disruption; it’s four separate ones. Here’s the “where” and “how” of those potential shake-ups:

    • The HCP relationship: Who manages a condition over time, not just who writes the first script?
    • Channel and patient experience: Who owns the point of fill, and how seamless is the drug-fulfillment experience?
    • Price transparency and patient OOP: How much of a role does real-world price play, for both prescribers and patients, and how do coupon and copay assistance programs need to adapt?
    • Data visibility: Does the full patient journey, from diagnosis to refill, sit outside the purview of traditional pharma data sources, or is it somehow still captured? 

    The four categories aren’t equally mature. And that has real implications for where pharma commercialization teams focus first. 

    Where pharma should focus

    The first two of the above categories are already live with the GLP-1 program. That is, ongoing management of a chronic condition now sits inside Amazon’s own clinical protocol, not a patient’s existing PCP or specialist. And prescribing, fulfillment, and refill take place in a channel pharma doesn’t traditionally call upon.

    GLP-1 is a favorable starting point for this model because it’s heavily consumer-driven and manageable in primary care, so the loop doesn’t need specialist judgment to run. And the GLP-1 cash-pay models give Amazon room to control pricing directly. Moreover, weight-loss management is a long-term, recurring relationship, which is exactly the kind of retention Amazon’s model is built for. 

    Beyond the cash market, Amazon’s ability to automatically apply coupons and copay assistance offers the opportunity for accelerated product uptake, accompanied by significant downside risks to product gross-to-net.  

    If your brand touches a condition that could be managed this way, GLP-1 isn’t a case study to read with curiosity. It’s a preview. Teams should be asking if and how this loop affects prescribing and fulfillment for their therapeutic area; that’s the immediate gap to close. 

    Conditions that depend on specialist diagnosis, complex or in-clinic administration, or those with reimbursement complexity, are a much harder fit for this model (at least for now). The therapeutic areas to watch first are protocol-friendly, primary-care-managed, chronic, and with a cash-pay market underneath.

    Payers and data

    Amazon’s impact on the payer space is at an earlier stage, but the signals are worth tracking closely. Amazon has already become the exclusive home delivery pharmacy for select PBM partners, including its own employee health plan. While that’s a narrow footprint today, whether it stays narrow or expands to further erode the traditional PBM mail-order business is the open question. Every new deal is a data point worth logging.

    Data visibility is the slowest mover of the four categories, and possibly the hardest to predict. Cash-pay markets already have data holes. Adherence and outcomes in these markets have always been harder to capture, since the transaction doesn’t run through the claims and pharmacy systems pharma is used to watching. 

    The bigger exposure is what happens if this extends into broader chronic disease management. Even losing part of a patient’s journey, say the fulfillment and refill half, is enough to break the continuity pharma relies on for adherence programs and tracking the various outcome measures of marketed treatments. 

    Other industries offer a useful, if uncomfortable, reference point. Retail went through its own version of this: Vertically integrated fulfillment that started as a convenience play eventually became infrastructure that competitors couldn’t easily match on price or speed. 

    That pattern is worth keeping in mind, not as a prediction of exactly how this plays out in life sciences, but as a reminder that the “early and narrow” phase doesn’t stay that way indefinitely.

    None of this is a call to panic. It’s a case for watching the right signals. The clearest one: which therapeutic area Amazon’s loop expands into next.

    Photo: undefined undefined, Getty Images

    Adrienne Lovink

    As CEO, Adrienne Lovink is leading Beghou’s next phase of growth and building on its reputation as a trusted commercialization partner in life sciences. She is focused on expanding into new areas of client demand; advancing the firm’s data, AI, analytics, and technology innovation; and investing in its people and culture. Adrienne has over 25 years of experience partnering with pharmaceutical and medical device companies to advance commercialization, market access, forecasting, digital health, real-world data, and advanced analytics, including as a Partner at Trinity Life Sciences and Global Head of Real-World Data and Advanced Analytics at DRG / Clarivate.

    This post appears through the MedCity Influencers program. Anyone can publish their perspective on business and innovation in healthcare on MedCity News through MedCity Influencers. Click here to find out how.

  • STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about WHO obesity guidelines for kids, DOJ targeting pharma, and more

    STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about WHO obesity guidelines for kids, DOJ targeting pharma, and more

    By Ed Silverman

    Oct. 7, 2026

    Pharmalot Columnist, Senior Writer

    Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the middle of the week. Congratulations on making it this far, and remember there are only a few more days until the weekend arrives. So keep plugging away. After all, what are the alternatives? While you ponder the possibilities, we invite you to join us for a needed cuppa stimulation. Our choice today is ginseng peach, a favorite from our pantry. Meanwhile, here is the latest menu of tidbits to help you on your way. We hope you conquer the world and have a wonderful day. And as always, please do stay in touch. We appreciate feedback, tips, and criticism. …

    The World Health Organization released its first guidelines addressing the sharp rise in obesity among children and adolescents, Health Policy Watch says. In 2024, 170 million children and adolescents aged 5–19 years were living with obesity, including 70 million children aged 5 to 9 years and 100 million adolescents aged 10 to 19 years. Obesity prevalence in this age group quadrupled since 1990, rising from 2% to 8%. But the WHO does not recommend pharmacological treatment, bariatric surgery, or weight loss devices for children aged 0 to 9 years. For adolescents aged 10 to 19 years, treatment with approved drugs may be considered only when a supervised multimodal lifestyle program has not achieved desired results.  

    Caribou Biosciences is shutting down after failing to raise the money necessary to fund a late-stage clinical trial of its off-the-shelf CAR-T therapy for lymphoma, STAT notes. The biotech, borne from the research lab of CRISPR scientist and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, will discontinue clinical development of its two CRISPR-based CAR-T therapies, including vispa-cel for the treatment of advanced B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Over the past year, Caribou had worked successfully with the Food and Drug Administration to finalize the design of a Phase 3 trial for vespa-cel. Unfortunately, raising the money to pay for the study proved too difficult.

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