Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Northwestern Medicine Succeeds With Novel Double Lung Transplants
NBC News: New Double Lung Transplant Technique Is Successful In Two Late-Stage Cancer Patients
A novel treatment for certain late-stage lung cancers has succeeded in the first two patients to undergo the operation. Using knowledge learned during the Covid pandemic, surgeons at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago successfully performed double lung transplantations in two patients with stage 4 cancer. Both patients are alive and well. (Sullivan and Snow, 3/15)
Chicago Tribune: Northwestern Unveils Program To Perform More Double Lung Transplants For Terminal Cancer Patients, After Successful Surgeries
When traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation fail, lung cancer can be a death sentence for many patients. That, however, may be changing, with Northwestern Medicine leading the way. Northwestern plans to begin regularly performing double lung transplants on patients with terminal lung cancer, after successfully transplanting lungs into two patients who would have otherwise died of the disease, the health system announced Wednesday. (Schencker, 3/15)
In other research and pharma news —
Stat: Momentum Grows To Subject Medical Devices To Placebo Treatment
It’s the gold standard in medicine: taking a treatment, and putting it head-to-head against a placebo to confidently declare whether it actually works. But for most medical devices, placebo trials have never been done. (Lawrence, 3/16)
Stat: Scientist Who Discovered Likely Top Cause Of MS Wants To Tackle ALS
Alberto Ascherio began his career as a young doctor treating tropical diseases in South American rainforests and parts of Africa. Over the next quarter-century, he made his way to what is now his wheelhouse: studying the links between viruses and neurodegenerative diseases. (Cueto, 3/16)
Stat: New Startup Bets On An Old Approach To Gene Editing
Before there was CRISPR, aspiring genome editors relied on an island of misfit, less elegantly named enzymes: Zinc-finger nucleases, TALENs, recombinases. Many of these once beloved tools were tossed aside when CRISPR came along, having helped few actual patients but driven plenty of graduate students to exhaustion. They were stubborn, inflexible enzymes, requiring endless engineering. CRISPR, by contrast, lets you cut almost any stretch of DNA with a simple chemical code. The field moved on, and one German researcher was left alone in his lab, whittling away at a pet protein most of his contemporaries abandoned. (Mast, 3/16)
NPR: CRISPR Gene-Editing Success For Sickle Cell Raises New Questions
Victoria Gray was wandering through the British Museum in London last week when she spotted a small wooden cross hanging on the wall. "It's nice seeing all the old artifacts, especially the cross," Gray said. "Religion is something that I hold close to my heart, and my faith is what brought me this far." (Stein, 3/16)
The Atlantic: The Rogue Theory That Gravity Causes IBS
Bad things happen to a human body in zero gravity. Just look at what happens to astronauts who spend time in orbit: Bones disintegrate. Muscles weaken. So does immunity. “When you go up into space,” says Saïd Mekari, who studies exercise physiology at the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada, “it’s an accelerated model of aging.” (Wapner, 3/15)
