Weekend update

David Ermer–Congress, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, Mental health care, Obesity, OPM, SCOTUS, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC,

  • The Senate maintains a daily Executive Calendar. There are now eight nominees whose names were reported to the Senate floor before Scott Kupor. According to the unanimous consent resolution page in the front of the calendar, the Senate will consider tomorrow the nominations of the earliest reported nominee David Fotouhi (March 13) and two nominees reported in May after Mr. Kupor (April 9). The FEHBlog think that this is the pattern that the Senate leadership is following, which means that the Senate is likely to take up Mr. Kupor’s nomination later this month. 
  • Roll Call summarizes expected Congressional activities for this week here.
    • As Senate committees continue to release their proposals for the House-passed reconciliation package this week, the House plans to vote on President Donald Trump’s proposals to rescind foreign aid and other spending, including for public broadcasting.
    • “The rescissions request sent to Congress by the Trump Administration takes the federal government in a new direction where we actually cut waste, fraud, and abuse and hold agencies accountable to the American people,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said in a statement.
  • The Supreme Court will be issuing another batch of opinions this coming Thursday.
  • Last Thursday, HR Dive tells us,
    • “A federal appeals court’s “background circumstances” requirement for majority-group plaintiffs who seek to prove job discrimination cuts against both Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and U.S. Supreme Court precedent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for a unanimous SCOTUS on Thursday.
    • “The court reversed the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, which had dismissed a heterosexual woman’s claim that she was unlawfully passed over for a promotion in favor of a lesbian woman and subsequently demoted, after which a gay man was hired to fill her original role. The plaintiff alleged that those decisions constituted illegal discrimination on the basis of her sexual orientation, which the Supreme Court has said is a form of sex-based discrimination under Title VII.
    • “The 6th Circuit held that the plaintiff could not show background circumstances to support her suspicion that her employer discriminated against her on the basis of her status as a member of a majority group.
    • “Justice Jackson, however, wrote that such requirements flout the Supreme Court’s case law, which “makes clear that the standard for proving disparate treatment under Title VII does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”
    • “The court vacated and remanded the case to the 6th Circuit for further proceedings.”
  • Federal News Network interviews Tammy Flanagan about “what retiring feds need to know about their benefits in transition.”
    • “Timing is everything when thinking about when to drop your retirement paperwork. Understanding what happens to your leave balances, health insurance, and survivor benefits can inform that decision. Hear with more on those key considerations is the Founder and Principal Retirement specialist at Retire Federal, Tammy Flanagan.”

From the public health and medical research front,

  • The University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP informs us,
    • “A new gene-tracking study in Nature shows that mpox spread among people in Nigeria for 8 years before it sparked a global outbreak in 2022.
    • “Using genomic tracing, researchers from Nigeria, the United States, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Belgium estimate that the ancestor of the clade 2 mpox virus (mpxv) that ignited an international outbreak beginning in May 2022 first emerged in southern Nigeria in August 2014 and spread to 11 Nigerian states before human infections were detected in 2017. 
    • “In light of the findings, the authors write, “We need improved surveillance in the wildlife population in the forest systems to better understand the transmission and maintenance of MPXV in animal hosts,” as well as better human surveillance.
    • “We could have very easily prevented the 2022 multi-country outbreak if countries in Africa were given better access to therapeutics, vaccines, and surveillance technologies,” says first author Edyth Parker, PhD, MPhil, a researcher with the Institute of Genomics and Global Health and with the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, in a Scripps Research news release. “In a vulnerably connected world, we cannot neglect epidemics until they get exported to the Global North.”
  • Medscape offers these reports from the recent American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) 2025 Annual Meeting.
    • Changing the prescribing protocol for low-dose aspirin (LDA) for preeclampsia prevention from risk-based to universal significantly increased aspirin use in pregnant patients, based on new data presented at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) 2025 Annual Meeting.
    • The use of LDA to reduce the risk for preeclampsia has been well established as an inexpensive and simple intervention, but it has remained underutilized nationwide, said lead author Meryl Y. Grimaldi, MD, of SBH Health System, New York City, in an interview.
    • “Many of the patients we care for at SBH Health are at high risk for preeclampsia, but we wanted to ensure that our eligible patients received the benefits of this intervention,” said Grimaldi, who presented the study at the meeting.
  • and
    • “Clinicians need to discuss and offer all patients a variety of pain management options for in-office gynecologic procedures ranging from intrauterine device (IUD) insertion to biopsies, according to new guidance published by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). The guidelines, published on May 15, are the first formal ones from ACOG to not only acknowledge the range of pain experiences that can be associated with different procedures but also to explicitly lay out recommendations for the conversations providers should have with their patients about what pain management options are available.
    • “This guidance speaks to more than just Ob/Gyns,” Co-Author Genevieve Hofmann, DNP, women’s health nurse practitioner and assistant professor of Ob/Gyn at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Colorado, said during a discussion with the press on May 17 at American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. “It speaks to any physician who’s providing these types of services and certainly to advanced practice registered nurses who work in women’s health and provide these services.”
  • Medscape adds,
    • Regeneron said on Monday [June 2, 2025,] its experimental drug helped patients preserve up to 51% of lean mass and lose more fat when used in combination with Novo Nordisk’s popular obesity drug Wegovy in a mid-stage trial. 
    • In the 599-patient study, those on Wegovy alone lost about 7.9 pounds of muscle, while those on a combination of Regeneron’s trevogrumab and Wegovy lost up to 4.2 pounds. 
    • The combination helped patients shed up to 11.3% of their body weight compared with 10.4% for those on only Wegovy. 
    • The results mark an early win for Regeneron in the race against nearly a dozen companies to develop obesity treatments that preserve muscle, as they vie for a share of the potential $150 billion weight-loss drug market. 

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Medical Economics “spoke with Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., director, Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy, and a former administrator at CMS, about why value-based care hasn’t been adopted more quickly.” and let us know that “New Marit Health data from May, 2025, reveal that physicians feel most satisfied where compensation aligns with cost of living, practice expectations and quality of life. These 10 states show that perceived fairness matters just as much as raw earnings.”
  • The Wall Street Journal reports,
    • Unexpected healthcare costs can arise in retirement, such as uncovered drugs, isolation and concierge care.
    • Medicare Part D may not cover all drugs, potentially leading to high out-of-pocket expenses for uncovered medications.
    • Retirees may face unexpected travel costs for medical care based on retirement location or feel compelled to pay for concierge medical care.
  • All PSHB plans and Most FEHB plans offer Medicare Part D plans which are integrated with the regular plan formulary, thereby reducing one of the Journal’s identified risks.
  • Per BioPharma Dive,
    • “Hiroyuki Okuzawa holds an enviable position. The veteran Daiichi Sankyo executive took over as the Japanese drugmaker’s new CEO two months ago and inherited a company whose cancer medicines have, over the past half-decade, won it three of the pharmaceutical industry’s largest licensing deals.
    • “One of those medicines, the antibody-drug conjugate Enhertu, again took the spotlight at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting here, showing potential to become part of standard therapy for the frontline treatment of advanced breast cancer. It did the same in 2022 and 2024.
    • “Okuzawa can point to Enhertu and four other antibody-drug conjugates Daiichi Sankyo’s developing with AstraZeneca and Merck & Co. as proof of the strength of its research laboratories. By 2030, the company plansto have these five “ADCs” approved across more than 30 tumor types, which would allow it to treat nearly 400,000 cancer patients each year.
    • “We’d like to become one of the most important players in oncology,” said Okuzawa, noting aspirations to crack the top 10 companies by cancer drug sales. “Our senior leaders are now talking about not only top 10, but maybe top 5. We’re very much confident in our ADCs.”
  • Per Fierce Healthcare,
    • Neuroscience technology company Brooklyn Health is using artificial intelligence to target a fundamental problem in neurology and psychiatry: the flawed approach to mental health outcomes measurement.
    • The startup aims to modernize mental health measurement and scoring in central nervous system (CNS) drug development, an area of CNS research that faces limitations in objectivity and standardization. 
    • “Clinical interviews, the standard for symptom assessment, are fundamentally unreliable and imprecise,” said Anzar Abbas, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and founder of Brooklyn Health, in an interview.
    • “Brooklyn’s platform uses AI and digital phenotyping methods it developed to evaluate the quality and scoring of clinical interviews in real time.” * * *
    • “Brooklyn’s current focus in on drug development and central nervous system clinical trials to improve outcome measurement, essentially, how well a drug is working. But the company has ambitions beyond clinical trials to support outcome measurement across all forms of behavioral health delivery, including in-clinic psychiatric care and virtual mental health platforms.” 
  • The Washington Post reports on a smartphone app Death Clock AI that predicts how many years a user has left before beginning to push daisies as they day.

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