The Readout Loud STAT

STAT's Nicholas Florko joins to explain what it means to be a reporter writing about the commercial determinants of health. Hint: Florko's most recent stories focus on weed, vapes, and raw milk. And instead of being chained to a desk, he often drives around to convenience stores and buy bad stuff — all in the name of good journalism. But first, co-hosts Adam Feuerstein and Allison DeAngelis chat about Pfizer's Duchenne gene therapy setback, the likely approval of a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease, and Bob Langer's most recent startup.

STAT colleague Meghana Keshavan joins us to dissect Lykos Therapeutics' meeting with an FDA advisory committee. We also discuss the latest news in the health and life sciences, including stories from major biotech conferences.
To learn more about Lykos' advisory committee meeting, go here; for more on the tumult at BIO, go here; for a recap of ASCO, go here; to read the latest on Novartis' acquisition of MorphoSys, go here. And you can sign up for Adam’s new newsletter, Biotech Scorecard, here.

We preview some of the research that will be presented at The American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago. We also discuss the latest news in the health and life sciences, including a milestone in lung disease R&D and a Duchenne muscular dystrophy confirmatory trial failure.  
To read more about Merus' combination therapy, go here; For more on Johnson & Johnson's mixed data, click here; For more on Nippon Shinyaku's Duchenne drug trial failure, go here; To read more on Insmed's bronchiectasis treatment, click here; To sign up for STAT's ASCO newsletter, click here.

This week on “The Readout LOUD,” STAT's Chief Washington Correspondent Rachel Cohrs Zhang joins us to discuss the layoffs at trade group BIO and how things may be changing at the trade group. We also invite STAT reporter Eric Boodman on to talk about his new investigative series of stories exploring how Black women with sickle cell disease were coerced into getting sterilized.

On this week’s "Readout LOUD," we’re live in San Francisco at STAT’s Breakthrough Summit West. AI is a big theme this year, everywhere, so on that note, we chat with our AI correspondent — and recent Pulitzer finalist — Casey Ross, who sat down on stage to discuss AI-centered drug discovery with both NVIDIA and Google-backed Isomorphic Labs.
We also discuss this week’s biotech news, including yet more obesity drug data, this time from Roche, and the closing of Novartis’ acquisition of MorphoSys.

This week on "The Readout LOUD," STAT senior infectious diseases reporter Helen Branswell walks us through ongoing H5N1 outbreak in the U.S. and issues with monitoring the spread. And in a bit of shameless self-promotion, we’ll talk to our colleagues Bob Herman and Casey Ross about being named Pulitzer finalists in investigative reporting for their reporting on United Healthcare’s use of algorithms in coverage decisions. We'll hear what’s happened since their explosive work was published last year.