First up, I want to share a few thoughts about the push by the state of California to resist President Trump’s agenda — and the ways in which it’s finding common ground with him on the issue of drug pricing.
One of the biggest stories out of California in the Trump era is the state’s ambitions to act as a counterweight to the Trump administration, on issues like climate change and immigration. New Gov. Gavin Newsom has already brought that fighting spirit to health care, vowing, for example, to extend Medicaid coverage to undocumented adults, as Politico’s Victoria Colliver observed in a smart piece last month.
That's why it was so striking to listen to Newsom’s State of the State speech yesterday. The governor thanked Trump for highlighting prescription drug prices in his State of the Union address. “Yes, you heard that right,” Newsom quipped. “I hope he follows through. After all, this should be a bipartisan issue. But with or without the federal government, California will lead.”
Newsom’s first big move after he took office last month was to sign a first-of-its-kind executive order creating the country’s largest direct purchaser of prescription drugs. His plan seeks to use buying power to try to lower prescription drug prices, by empowering state officials to directly negotiate on behalf of the 13 million Californians covered by the state Medicaid program, as well as state workers and others whose drugs are purchased by state agencies.
Also last month, the Trump administration put out its boldest proposal to date aimed at lowering drug prices: a plan to eliminate certain rebatesthat drug makers pay insurance companies in Medicare.
Newsom and Trump are taking on drug pricing from different angles. But it’s remarkable how aligned they are in spirit. For California, it seems, resisting Trump may mean sounding a lot like him on the drug pricing issue.
Now, onto the latest headlines
Lest you thought the CRISPR patent drama was finally over, there’s been a new development: The University of California will be granted the foundational genome-editing patent it first sought six years ago, my STAT colleague Sharon Begley reports. That could revive a legal battle with the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., that was resolved in the Broad’s favor last September. Meanwhile, another Boston v. Bay Area CRISPR fight has emerged, in the form of a license dispute pitting Cambridge-based Intellia Therapeutics against Berkeley-based Caribou Biosciences, Xconomy’s Alex Lash reports.
Remember last fall’s CRISPR’d babies controversy? Stanford officials are investigating what several of its high-profile researchers knew about Chinese scientist (and former Stanford postdoc) He Jiankui’s widely criticized experiment, MIT Technology Review reports.
A new opinion piece published in JAMA doesn’t explicitly call out Silicon Valley, but it reads like a subtweet of the region’s ethos. The Harvard authors warn that the rush to bring artificial intelligence and connected devices into health care is yielding new biological measurements, often based on opaque algorithms, that may prioritize profit over value for patients. The authors coin a wonderful new term: biomarkup, to refer to the avalanche of probing that occurs “when biomarkers are promoted and sometimes even designed for economic gain.”
Facebook’s health team is gearing up to roll out its first public-facing product in the U.S.: a feature connecting Facebook users willing to donate blood with hospitals and blood banks facing shortages, Business Insider’s Erin Brodwin reports. The tool is a first step, to be sure, but it strikes me as considerably less ambitious than the health care aspirations of Facebook’s Big Tech peers. Meanwhile, a new paper examines Facebook’s suicide prevention push — and questions whether its users are being helped and protected, my STAT colleague Megan Thielking reports.
Apple just made an intriguing new hire: prominent OB-GYN Dr. Christine Curry, who could help the company move into women’s health, CNBC’s Chrissy Farr reports.
To celebrate their 70th birthdays, a Los Angeles area couple donated $70 million to the nonprofit scientific research organization LA BioMed, the LA Times reports. The gift will go to running the institute, recruiting scientists, and bringing in biotech startups to a new incubator program.
What happens to digital health startups after they die? TechCrunch reports on the case of shuttered San Francisco startup Lantern, which is now licensing out its intellectual property and tech to other companies. Lantern wound down operations last summer after it struggled to build a business around online mental health coaching.
Chart of the week
I was intrigued by new survey data from Rock Health, the San Francisco-based digital health venture capital firm. Rock Health asked 4,000 U.S. adults whether they’d be willing to share their health data with a tech company. Of the 11 percent of respondents who said yes, three-fifths of them said they’d trust Google — the highest score among the tech companies included in the survey. Toward the lower end, two-fifths of willing respondents said they’d open up their health data to Facebook, which you may have noticed has been struggling lately with privacy scandals unrelated to health.
Spotted in the wild: An update on unicorns
This week brought a few items of note concerning West Coast health-care unicorns — those privately held companies valued above $1 billion.
Two new unicorns have joined the herd: One of them is Salt Lake City-based Health Catalyst, which helps hospitals analyze their own data. The other is San Francisco-based Calm, which started with a meditation app and is now building out a health business aimed at health-care practitioners.
Also in the news: recently minted unicorn Hims, a stylish San Francisco startup that offers online prescriptions for generic drugs for erectile dysfunction and other conditions. Some doctors are concerned about Hims's recent move to relax guidelines that had previously discouraged its physicians from prescribing ED medication to men with certain risky health conditions like diabetes and elevated blood pressure, Business Insider reports.
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