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  • STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about U.S.-funded psychedelic trials, an AstraZeneca R&D center, and more

    STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about U.S.-funded psychedelic trials, an AstraZeneca R&D center, and more

    By Ed Silverman

    Oct. 6, 2026

    Pharmalot Columnist, Senior Writer

    Rise and shine, everyone, another busy day is on the way. And it is getting off to a pleasant start here on the Pharmalot campus, where clear blue skies and comfy breezes are greeting us. As for the official mascots, they are happily snoozing in their respective corners. As for us, we are firing up the trusty kettle for another cuppa stimulation. Our choice today is honeybush vanilla turmeric. Of course, you are invited to join us. For the full experience, we are now hawking replicas — take a look. Meanwhile, here are a few items of interest. As always, do keep in touch. We appreciate feedback, criticism, and tips. …

    The Trump administration is advancing the first government-funded clinical trials of the psychedelic drug ibogaine to treat opioid addiction and ​post-traumatic stress disorder, Reuters says. The initiative ⁠follows an executive order signed last April by President Trump that dedicated $50 million ​to the federal ibogaine research, as well as recent calls by experts and ​veterans for strict safety standards on psychedelic treatments. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it has opened a public docket seeking feedback on trial design, dose selection, patient ​eligibility, safety monitoring, study-stopping rules, and oversight by Nov. 20.

    AstraZeneca’s pivot towards the U.S. market has continued with the opening of a new R&D center in the biotech hotspot of Cambridge, Mass., the centerpiece of a $1 billion investment program in the state, Pharmaphorum explains. The new facility in the Kendall Square area — which is one of the densest biotech clusters in the world, with hundreds of small and large biopharma companies present — covers 570,000 square feet of lab and office space over 18 stories. The center is part of a major investment program by the U.K.-based company that was first announced in 2024 and dramatically expanded to around $50 billion last year.

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  • STAT+: Nobel-winning optogenetics research has led to experimental treatments for blindness and Alzheimer’s

    STAT+: Nobel-winning optogenetics research has led to experimental treatments for blindness and Alzheimer’s

    Annalisa (Nalis) Merelli is focused on boys’ and men’s health: She looks into reproductive health, trending treatments, screening approaches, mental health, and everything in between.

    It is probably impossible to overstate how complex a brain is: A network of billions of intertwined neurons forming an intricate anatomy, capable of working on the millisecond scale to perceive reality, detect sensations, create plans, and take actions. 

    “All of this is incredibly complicated, and so of course the challenge that we face as neuroscientists and as physicians treating brain disorders is how can we hope to make headway without tools that match the complexity and the precision of the brain?” said Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher who on Monday won the 2026 Nobel Prize for Medicine, alongside German colleagues Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for work developing such tools. 

    “Our perception of reality and all our inner subjective states come from cells, and so the appropriate tool that would be matched to how the brain works would be something that was fast and could be targeted to individual cells or individual types of cells,” he said in an interview after the announcement. 

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  • STAT+: New Trump regulations would clean up health care pricing disclosures

    STAT+: New Trump regulations would clean up health care pricing disclosures

    Public drug price information is now coming next year, Trump officials say

    Mehmet Oz at a federal event on Monday in Washington announcing new health care price transparency rules.Finn Gomez/Getty Images

    By Bob Herman

    Oct. 5, 2026

    Bob Herman is the author of Health Care Inc., an award-winning weekly newsletter about the business of health and medicine.

    Bob covers the money in health care, focusing on health insurance and hospitals. His stories delve into Medicare Advantage, opaque prescription drug benefits, and how much executives actually make. He is also the author of the Health Care Inc. newsletter. You can reach Bob on Signal at bobjherman.09.

    The Trump administration released new regulations Monday that will force health insurance companies to publish cleaned-up spreadsheets of the prices that they pay hospitals and doctors, while stripping out meaningless data that clogged up the files.

    Trump officials also said they will start developing the system for disclosing prescription drug prices next month. A “hopeful” final plan for drug pricing data will come out by next May, said Mehmet Oz, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, at an event Monday. The government will enforce those requirements by the end of 2027. 

    Last year, the Trump administration punted on finalizing drug price disclosure rules, in a victory for drug companies and pharmacy benefit managers that have fiercely guarded their prices. 

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    1. Business of Health Care Reporter

      Bob covers the money in health care, focusing on health insurance and hospitals. His stories delve into Medicare Advantage, opaque prescription drug benefits, and how much executives actually make. He is also the author of the Health Care Inc. newsletter. You can reach Bob on Signal at bobjherman.09.

  • STAT+: Utah plows ahead with more health AI pilots for prescriptions, women’s health

    STAT+: Utah plows ahead with more health AI pilots for prescriptions, women’s health

    Mario covers technology in health care, including FDA regulation of artificial intelligence; how Medicare pays for health tech; the use of AI in clinical care; mental health chatbots; and consumer wearables. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

    Utah regulators on Monday announced a plan to allow an artificial intelligence product to evaluate patients for acne treatment and write new drug prescriptions without prior human review. 

    A startup called Nolla Health will launch an AI-powered service in the state that will assess a patient for mild-to-moderate acne treatment using a structured intake and by analyzing photos of their skin. The product may determine whether one of a list of low-risk drugs is appropriate. In the first stages of the pilot, the decisions of the AI will be reviewed by a licensed clinician who will sign off on prescriptions, but Nolla may eventually be allowed to prescribe drugs without this review. The company last year announced it raised $4.5 million from investors including General Catalyst, and Nolla aspires to direct treatment for a host of conditions using AI.

    The new pilot is part of a significant expansion of a closely watched “AI sandbox” program that allows Utah’s Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, or OAIP, to waive regulations, including around the practice of medicine, for companies that want to test AI products under state supervision. 

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  • STAT+: NIH awarded all its grant funding, but delayed and opaque decisions stymied researchers

    STAT+: NIH awarded all its grant funding, but delayed and opaque decisions stymied researchers

    A STAT analysis of National Institutes of Health spending shows that in the 2026 fiscal year, which ended Wednesday, the agency continued reducing grant awards involving health disparities, race, and ethnicity but made little progress toward other Trump administration priorities, including disbursing funds more evenly across the country and expanding support for early-career scientists.

    While the agency, like last year, spent its entire external grants budget of roughly $34 billion after a slow start, the manner in which it did so is sowing deep uncertainty among researchers. In a survey and interviews, they said delays in the grant review process are slowing down the pace of their work, and making it difficult for them to propose and conduct the sort of innovative, impactful science that the NIH exists to support.

    Overall, the agency funded around 58,000 projects, a slight drop from the 61,000 awarded during the 2025 fiscal year and well below the roughly 63,700 grants awarded annually in the years before the second Trump administration. Though this number may increase somewhat in the coming weeks because of reporting lags in the NIH grants database, the smaller number of grants potentially resulted from the White House’s push to fully fund more multiyear grants in advance, which meant that there was less funding on hand to issue new awards. 

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  • STAT+: A major insurer on how it may replicate Medicare’s chronic-care experiment

    STAT+: A major insurer on how it may replicate Medicare’s chronic-care experiment

    You’re reading the web edition of STAT’s Health Tech newsletter

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    Mario covers technology in health care, including FDA regulation of artificial intelligence; how Medicare pays for health tech; the use of AI in clinical care; mental health chatbots; and consumer wearables. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

    You’re reading the web edition of STAT’s Health Tech newsletter, our guide to how technology is transforming the life sciences. Sign up to get it delivered in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.

    Blue Shield of California is one of 17 major health plans that has committed to adopting payment models inspired by the Medicare Innovation Center’s ACCESS Model.

    The insurer’s chief medical officer Ravi Kavasery told me that it’s still figuring out details of what this will look like, including whether it will adopt CMS payment amounts and what organizations it will work with. He said Blue Shield of California, which serves 6 million members, expect to launch similar models in commercial plans in 2027. 

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    1. Health Tech Correspondent

      Mario covers technology in health care, including FDA regulation of artificial intelligence; how Medicare pays for health tech; the use of AI in clinical care; mental health chatbots; and consumer wearables. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

  • STAT+: HHS announces new efforts to speed up, expand clinical trials with AI

    STAT+: HHS announces new efforts to speed up, expand clinical trials with AI

    WASHINGTON — The Department of Health and Human Services announced a set of new initiatives aimed at speeding up clinical trials by incorporating more artificial intelligence and computational models and moving away from sharply delineated trial phases. 

    The centerpiece five-year program, dubbed SURPASS — “Simulation-augmented, Real-time Platform Adaptive Seamless Trials” — will kick off later this fall by accepting “ground-breaking ideas from cross-disciplinary teams in statistics, AI, and clinical trial design, operations, and regulation,” reads a website about the program. 

    HHS is launching the program through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The initial announcement did not note how much funding was designated for the new initiatives, nor did it provide details on whether participants would be offered more flexibility or resources.  

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  • STAT+: What health tech leaders are talking about in Washington policy circles

    STAT+: What health tech leaders are talking about in Washington policy circles

    You’re reading the web edition of STAT’s AI Prognosis newsletter

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    Brittany Trang, Ph.D., covers AI in health and medicine: Does it actually work? Who benefits, or might be harmed? She writes the weekly AI Prognosis newsletter. Follow her on Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. You can reach Brittany on Signal at btrang.01.

    This is the web edition of STAT’s AI Prognosis newsletter, our guide to artificial intelligence in health care and medicine. Sign up to get it delivered in your inbox every Wednesday. 

    It never crossed my mind that there would be a Cookie Monster AI satire piece in the New Yorker, but it does exist and I love it so much. h/t to my colleague Sarah Todd for sharing “Cookie Monster Tries to Meet His A.I. Mandate.”

    News I missed, story tips, comments: [email protected]

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    1. Brittany Trang, Ph.D., covers AI in health and medicine: Does it actually work? Who benefits, or might be harmed? She writes the weekly AI Prognosis newsletter. Follow her on Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. You can reach Brittany on Signal at btrang.01.

  • STAT+: Anthropic joins ARPA-H clinical AI moonshot, will hold closed-door health care event

    STAT+: Anthropic joins ARPA-H clinical AI moonshot, will hold closed-door health care event

    You’re reading the web edition of STAT’s health tech newsletter

    Nicolas TUCAT / AFP via Getty Images

    Mario covers technology in health care, including FDA regulation of artificial intelligence; how Medicare pays for health tech; the use of AI in clinical care; mental health chatbots; and consumer wearables. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

    You’re reading the web edition of STAT’s Health Tech newsletter, our guide to how technology is transforming the life sciences. Sign up to get it delivered in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday.

    Good morning health tech readers!

    Anthropic has been loudly warning that AI might one day lead to catastrophe. And yet, the company is moving aggressively into health care, even as AI regulation is in a state of flux.

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    1. Health Tech Correspondent

      Mario covers technology in health care, including FDA regulation of artificial intelligence; how Medicare pays for health tech; the use of AI in clinical care; mental health chatbots; and consumer wearables. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.