AI advancements in healthcare raise concerns about overlooking patient perspectives and deepening inequalities. Automated decision-making systems often deny resources to the needy, demonstrating biases that could propagate into AI-driven medicine. This article advocates for participatory machine learning and patient-led research to prioritize patient expertise in the medical field.
Tuesday, March 12, 2024Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine, developed to target melanoma, might also treat a form of head and neck cancer. Data from an early trial showed a greater survival rate for patients who took Moderna's cancer vaccine alongside immunotherapy treatments. The news sent Moderna's share price soaring.
Gram-negative bacteria are often hardy, virulent, and quick to evolve resistance to antibiotics. Scientists have developed an antibiotic that kills pathogenic Gram-negative bacteria without impairing the gut microbiome. Still untested in humans, the compound's usefulness will depend on whether the bacteria will develop resistance to it in the long run. The time from an antibiotic's discovery to its approval for clinical use can be more than two decades, and there is not much money to be made with a novel antibiotic - around ten to twenty new Gram-negative antibiotics have been discovered in the past decade but none have gained approval from the US FDA.
The experimental drug donanemab slowed the progression of Alzheimer's disease by about 35% in a study of more than 1,700 people. Eli Lilly, the company that makes the drug, has submitted the results of its study to the Food and Drug Administration, which is expected to make a decision on the drug by the end of the year. The drug is still not a cure - its benefits amount to only about a seven-month delay in the loss of memory and thinking. The drug caused dangerous swelling or bleeding in the brain in about 25% of patients.
A twice-yearly injection of a new pre-exposure prophylaxis drug was shown to provide young women total protection from HIV infection in a large clinical trial performed in South Africa and Uganda. The drug, lenacapavir, works by interfering with the protein shell that protects HIV's genetic material and the enzymes needed for replication. Gilead Sciences plans to submit the drug for approval with a number of country regulators within the next couple of months. It will offer licenses to companies that make generic drugs to help get prices down.
PA-LLaVA is a domain-specific language-vision assistant designed for pathology image analysis.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals is currently seeking regulatory approval for a new drug that looks promising in clinical trials. Suzetrigine could be the first of an entirely new class of pain therapy. It targets specific sodium ion channels found on pain-sensing nerve cells. While the effect of the drug is modest, it demonstrates that the strategy of targeting sodium channels specific to pain-sensing neurons works, leading to hope that the next generation of these compounds could perform much better. Suzetrigine could be approved by early 2025.
Schizophrenia is one of the costliest mental health illnesses - it costs nearly $300 billion dollars in healthcare spending annually despite affecting less than 1% of the population. It is currently treated with antipsychotics, a treatment discovered through pure chance. Regulators are currently deciding whether to approve a drug with a novel mechanism for treating schizophrenia. The new drug has opened up a new hypothesis for schizophrenia, which multiple biotech companies are pursuing.
The results from a landmark pair of major clinical trials of lenacapavir, an injectable HIV-prevention drug that only requires dosing every six months, show that it is 89% more effective at preventing HIV than daily oral preventative medication among gay, bisexual, and transgender people. It could be a game changer if rolled out broadly and equitably, but the drug is extraordinarily expensive. Its current list price for use as an HIV treatment is $3,450 per month. It is unclear whether it will have a different list price for use as a preventive.