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Thursday, March 15, 2018
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Happy Thursday, everyone! Here's what you need to know about health and medicine this morning.
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Hospitals are facing long-term shortages of injectable opioids
There's
growing concern among medical providers nationwide about long-term shortages of injectable opioids. The severity of
the shortage — which has been brewing since last summer — only recently became clear when Pfizer, which controls roughly 60 percent of the injectable opioids market in the U.S., began notifying customers that its production
has ground to a halt. The drug maker says the problem is with a manufacturer that makes a component of the syringes, which are pre-filled with morphine, fentanyl, and other opioids.
Now, with Pfizer's production slated to be on hold until June 2019, many hospitals are launching efforts to conserve the drugs, which are critical for treating patients undergoing major surgeries and those who are suffering from intense pain related to trauma
or cancer. STAT's Casey Ross has more
here.
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Top health officials talk budgets on Capitol Hill
Health secretary Alex Azar is headed to Capitol Hill this morning to
talk about HHS’s budget for next year. Congress still has to hammer out the details of next year’s spending; President Trump’s budget blueprint proposed funding cuts to the CDC, but raised the budgets for the FDA, the NIH, and the Indian Health
Service. Also talking about budgets today: VA Secretary
David Shulkin.
Meanwhile, the watchdog group Equity Forward launched a big ad campaign today asking Azar whether he stands with Scott Lloyd, who runs the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement. Lloyd has been fiercely criticized for impeding access to abortion for undocumented
immigrant teens. The campaign comes just days after California Sen. Dianne Feinstein called for Lloyd to resign, arguing that he's "used his official office to block vulnerable young women from accessing medical care."
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Lab Chat: A magic trick in the brain to sense movement in a prosthesis
It's now possible to play a magic trick on the brain that makes patients with amputated limbs feel like they can sense their prostheses move, researchers report in
Science Translational Medicine. Here’s what Paul Marasco of Cleveland Clinic told me about the work.
This system creates what you call a “perceptual illusion.” What is that?
If you vibrate a muscle mechanically, you’ll get a sense in the joint that’s crossed by that muscle that it’s moving, even though it’s not. Like if you pinch your nose and vibrate your biceps, you get the
sense your arm is moving. So your brain thinks your nose is extending because your arm is moving and pulling it away from your face. These illusions override reality, and they’re really powerful.
How did you use those illusions to make robotic limbs feel more natural?
We designed a feedback system based on perceptual illusions. The muscles we’re vibrating to cause the illusions are muscles that are actually part of a neural-machine interface we built by redirecting the
nerves from an amputated hand to the end of the residual limb. We program the prosthetic to move exactly like the illusion. So as the muscles vibrate and the prosthetic moves, the amputees can feel it like it’s moving.
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What you should know about the Theranos news
In case you missed it, the Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes with fraud, alleging the Silicon Valley upstart deceived investors by exaggerating and making false
claims about its technology.
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The claims: Theranos sold investors on its blood testing technology, but
also its financial health. The SEC's complaint says Theranos projected a thousand times more revenue in 2014 than it actually earned.
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The settlement: Both Holmes and Theranos are settling the cases,
STAT's Rebecca Robbins
reports. For Holmes, that means paying a $500,000 penalty, giving up voting control of the company, returning shares obtained during the fraud, and not serving in leadership at a public company for a decade.
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The next steps: Around early 2016, federal prosecutors launched
a criminal investigation, separate from this settlement, into whether Theranos misled investors. The Wall Street Journal
reports that investigation is still underway.
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Scientists capture how a staph infection wreaks havoc
Scientists captured this abcess in a mouse kidney, in yellow, and spots that are starved of nutrient metals, in red. (j.e. cassat et. al, science translational medicine)
Scientists have
created a new tool to capture how bacteria infects and changes tissue over time. It’s been tricky to see how bacteria and tissue interact early in an infection — scientists either have to know exactly what proteins and
metals in the tissue they’re looking for, or they have to destroy the infected tissue to find it. So researchers mashed up different imaging techniques to track the molecular changes in both Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and the tissue it infected in a mouse
model. Now, they want to test the technique in other animal models and human tissue and with other pathogens.
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A new app aims to harness data from patients with brain cancer
There’s a new patient network launching this week that aims to help patients with brain cancer take an active role in their care — and contribute to research along the way.
The OurBrainBank app gives patients a way to report their own data, everything from their medical care and symptoms to their mood and diet choices. Researchers can harness that data and potentially use it to recruit clinical
trial participants. “What makes OurBrainBank particularly promising is that it’s been designed by, with, and for patients. That means it works for people like me," Jessica Morris, who was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2016 and helped create the app, tells
me.
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What to read around the web today
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Class-action lawsuit filed against Pacific Fertility for loss of up to thousands of embryos and eggs.
Washington Post
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Veterans health program closes 'indefinitely' after killings.
New York Times
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Lifting therapy caps is a load off Medicare patients' shoulders.
Kaiser Health News
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Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,
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