Cybersecurity Saturday

Generative AI

Cybersecurity Saturday

David Ermer–Cybersecurity, Generative AI–

From the Project Glasswing front,

  • Tech Crunch reports,
    • “The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off access to two of its most powerful AI models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — citing national security concerns. Anthropic announced on X that it has complied, but it made clear it thinks the government got this one wrong.
    • “The directive, which Anthropic said it received on Friday [June 12] at 5:21 pm ET, forces the company to disable both models for all users worldwide — not just the foreign nationals the government’s export control order was nominally aimed at. Access to Anthropic’s other models isn’t affected.” * * *
    • “Fable 5, released just three days ago, was Anthropic’s answer to the obvious commercial pressure: a version of Mythos fitted with guardrails that block responses in high-risk areas like cybersecurity and biology, making it safe enough for general release, the company argued. It was immediately the most capable AI model available to the public, according to benchmark tests from Vals AI, a company that tracks AI tech performance.” * * *
    • “Anthropic is widely expected to pursue an IPO this year and has staked much of its public identity on being the safety-conscious alternative to its rivals. The irony isn’t lost on observers that the very caution Anthropic displayed in restricting Mythos — which it promoted as a model so dangerous it couldn’t be released publicly — has now apparently attracted exactly the kind of government scrutiny that could disrupt its business most.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

  • Federal News Network reminds us,
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is restarting public engagements on delayed cyber incident reporting rules that will likely cover tens of thousands of critical infrastructure organizations.
    • “The meetings come as CISA faces pressure to issue the final regulations quickly, while some lawmakers and industry groups also want the agency to amend the draft rules to be less broad and burdensome.
    • “Starting Monday, CISA will host a series of virtual town halls to get feedback on the draft regulations to implement the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA). The meetings will run through Wednesday.”
  • Cyberscoop reports,
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday [June 10] ordered federal agencies to prioritize vulnerabilities based on four criteria, as part of push to “patch smarter, not harder.”
    • “Federal agencies should emphasize patches for vulnerabilities that affect a publicly exposed asset, allow an attacker to fully automate exploitation, give attackers the ability to take over control of a system or relate to evidence of active, real-world exploitation, CISA declared.
    • “CISA acting director Nick Andersen previewed the binding operational directive (BOD) Tuesday [June 9], framing it as a rethinking of vulnerability management more broadly.” * * *
    • “BOD 26-04 sets forth timelines for how quickly agencies must fix a vulnerability based on how many of the four criteria it meets. If it meets all four, for example, agencies need to fix it within three days and carry out a “forensic triage” to assess whether their systems were compromised. 
    • “More generally, agencies must immediately update their vulnerability management policies, including establishing a process for ongoing remediation of known, exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs) on CISA’s “must-patch” list. Within 60 days, agencies need to update their processes for remediating common vulnerabilities, and within 180 days, agencies must meet the order’s remediation timelines.
    • “The directive is motivated in part by how artificial intelligence is shifting the window from vulnerability discovery to weaponization, and CISA said it reflects priorities in an executive order on AI that President Donald Trump signed last week.”
  • and
    • “The FBI, along with Google and Lumen Technologies, took down a major cybercrime network based in China that was responsible for an estimated $1.9 billion in losses, officials said Friday. 
    • “Outsider, which provided phishing kits and hosted infrastructure for cybercriminals since July 2023, facilitated a wave of phishing attacks against people and businesses in 55 countries, including the United States, the FBI said in a LinkedIn post.
    • “The jointly coordinated effort dubbed “Operation Ghost Hook” netted the seizure of several domains of the group’s core admin servers, a Shopify storefront, roughly $100,000 from Outsider payment wallets and thousands of domains registered through U.S.-based providers, officials said.
    • “The FBI said it also used an Outsider Telegram bot to access information on the cybercrime network’s customers.”
  • and
    • “A longtime former member of Conti, a ransomware group that attacked more than 1,000 organizations globally before it disbanded in 2022, pleaded guilty to participating in some of those attacks in federal court Wednesday [June 10], the Justice Department said.
    • “Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, also known as Alexsey Alexseevich Litvinenko, admitted he joined the prolific cybercrime group in September 2021 and held data on 12 victims, including eight based in the United States. The 44-year-old told the court he developed malware that Conti used in some of its attacks, according to officials.” 
  • Bleeping Computer adds,
    • “Law enforcement has dismantled the “AudiA6” cryptocurrency service allegedly used by ransomware actors and other cybercriminals to launder more than $380 million.
    • “Europol says that the service has been linked to more than 15 distinct international investigations of ransomware attacks.
    • “It is believed that the platform acted as a central money laundering hub between 2022 and 2025.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

  • Bleeping Computer reports,
    • “Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest producer of insulin, disclosed a data breach affecting patient information from some clinical trials.
    • “Founded in 1923, Novo Nordisk now employs around 67,900 people across 80 offices worldwide and is the maker of viral GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs Wegovy and Ozempic.
    • “The company revealed on Thursday [June 11] that attackers gained access to its internal IT systems and data related to patients participating in some clinical trials, including their patient IDs (random alphanumeric strings) and information on trial participation, sex, year of birth, biomarkers, health/immunogenicity data, and lifestyle factors (e.g., smoking, alcohol use, BMI).
    • “However, Novo Nordisk said that this data was pseudonymized and that the attackers can’t use it to identify any affected patients by name.
    • “While our investigation and response are ongoing, we have discovered that certain non-public data, including personal data, was copied externally without authorisation. We are informing the impacted parties as appropriate,” the company said.”
  • HIPAA Journal tells us,
    • “Episource, a provider of medical coding, risk adjustment services, and software solutions, experienced a cyberattack in early 2025, in which files containing patient data were exfiltrated from its network. In June 2025, the forensic investigation had progressed, and it was confirmed that 5.4 million individuals had been affected.
    • “The investigation has since revealed the data breach was more extensive, involving unauthorized access to the electronic protected health information of 6,725,572 individuals, according to updated figures provided to the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights. With more than 6.7 million affected individuals, the data breach currently ranks as the third-largest healthcare data breach of 2025, behind the 13.9 million-record data breach at Aflac and the 62.2 million-record data breach at Conduent Business Services, and ranks as the 16th-largest healthcare data breach of all time. The threat group behind the incident remains unknown.”
  • Industrial Cyber relates,
    • “Global cyberattack activity eased in May 2026 following April’s sharp rebound, but the broader threat landscape remained volatile, according to research from Check Point Research. Organizations experienced an average of 2,055 weekly cyberattacks during the month, representing a 2% increase year-over-year despite a 7% decline from April. Education remained the most targeted sector, averaging 4,641 weekly attacks per organization, while government and telecommunications also continued to face elevated attack volumes. 
    • “The report noted notable year-over-year increases in attacks targeting agriculture, hospitality, travel, recreation, and construction sectors as digitalization expands across these industries. The most significant trend was a sharp rise in ransomware activity. Check Point recorded 698 ransomware attacks globally in May, a 48% increase compared to the same month last year and the highest year-over-year growth rate recorded in 2026. Business services accounted for 35% of all ransomware victims, while consumer goods and industrial manufacturing also experienced substantial increases. 
    • “The report found that ransomware activity has become increasingly fragmented, with 61 active groups operating during the month. Qilin emerged as the most active ransomware group, responsible for 14% of published attacks, followed by The Gentlemen and DragonForce.”
  • Dark Reading adds,
    • “Phishing attacks are down across most industries, yet researchers argue the phishing threat is higher today than ever, as the fewer attacks that are perpetrated are becoming more dangerous.
    • “In its 2026 annual phishing report, Zscaler researchers framed the trend not as a drop but as a “rebalancing” — threat actors moving from wide spray-and-pray campaigns to more focused attacks with higher conversion rates.”
  • CISA added seven known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
    • June 8, 2026
      • CVE-2026-42271 BerriAI LiteLLM Command Injection Vulnerability
      • CVE-2026-50751 Check Point Security Gateway Improper Authentication Vulnerability
        • Infosec discusses the BerriAI KVE here.
        • Cybersecurity Dive discusses the Check Point KVE here.
    • June 9, 2026
      • CVE-2026-7473 Arista Extensible Operating System Incomplete Comparison with Missing Factors Vulnerability
      • CVE-2026-11645 Google Chromium V8 Out-of-Bounds Read and Write Vulnerability
      • CVE-2026-20245 Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output Vulnerability
        • Scorifya discusses the Arista KVE here.
        • Cybersecurity News discusses the Google KVE here.
        • Cybersecurity Dive discusses the Cisco KVE here.
    • June 11, 2026
      • CVE-2026-10520. Ivanti Sentry OS Command Injection Vulnerability
        • Dark Reading discusses this KVE here.
    • June 12, 2026
      • CVE-2026-35273 Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools Missing Authentication for Critical Function Vulnerability
        • Cybersscoop discusses this KVE here.
  • Info Security Magazine informs us,
    • “Cybersecurity software regularly fails to detect and prevent the cyber-attacks they are designed to protect organizations from, especially within the bowser layer, research by Menlo Security has warned.
    • “Published on June 9, Menlo Security’s 2026 Browser Threat Report found that one in five phishing attacks which target the enterprise browser users go completely undetected by the tools which are supposed to protect the network and its users from attacks.
    • “Based on platform telemetry across millions of active browser sessions in enterprise customer environments between January 1 and March 31 2026, the research warned that threat actors are gaining entry to enterprise environments through the browser session layer.
    • “The problem, the paper said, is that attacks via the browser target areas which many traditional enterprise cybersecurity products are not designed to identify or prevent suspicious activity in.
  • Cybersecurity Dive points out,
    • “Financial services organizations are widely using AI agents for common business operations, but many of them aren’t sure whether their AI tools have opened the door for hackers, according to a new report.
    • “Sixty-two percent of financial services firms have deployed AI agents, and 93% of those firms have given them some level of autonomy, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) said in its Tuesday report.
    • “The report’s authors said the main conclusion from their survey, which consisted of interviews with 340 global IT and security professionals between Jan. 15 and March 1, is that “financial institutions have deployed AI faster than they have secured it.”
  • Per Security Week,
    • “Palo Alto Networks drew attention to a high-severity security flaw in the Cortex XSOAR and Cortex XSIAM platforms that could allow attackers to access and modify restricted resources.
    • “Tracked as CVE-2026-0274, the issue is described as the improper validation of credentials in the CommvaultSecurityIQ integration of the affected products and does not require a special configuration to be triggered.
    • “The company also rolled out patches for eight medium and low-severity security defects in PAN-OS, Prisma Access Agent, Cortex XSOAR, and GlobalProtect App.
    • “Palo Alto Networks says it is not aware of any of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild.
    • “On Wednesday [June 10], Splunk published a dozen advisories detailing security weaknesses in its products and third-party libraries they use.”

From the ransomware front,

  • Health Exec reports,
    • “A health system in Mississippi has revealed a December 2025 data breach of its network resulted in records on 53,888 patients being stolen by hackers. Meanwhile an infamous cybercrime cell has claimed credit for the attack, posting proof on the dark web.
    • “Last month Singing River Health System reported official numbers from the incident to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which operates a data breach tracker. This came after an investigation into what it called a “cybersecurity incident” that staff at Singing River discovered a few days after cybercriminals were already inside its network.
    • “According to the health system, which said it worked with a third-party cybersecurity firm on its investigation, its network was compromised from Dec. 19 to 21, 2025, before the unauthorized access was discovered and containment protocols were deployed.” * * *
    • “Researchers at Comparitech released a report last week showing that Anubis—a cybercrime syndicate known for its ransomware attacks against healthcare entities—had claimed credit for the data breach in a post on its own dark web leak site.
    • “The group claims to have 293 GB of data from Singing River, much of it containing sensitive patient information. It posted samples to prove it had the goods, including what Comparitech described as “intimate images of surgeries and injuries.”
  • The Hacker News relates,
    • “A new analysis of The Gentlemen operation has revealed that the financially motivated threat group initially operated as an affiliate responsible for conducting double extortion attacks, while leveraging resources from various ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes like LockBit (aka Tenacious Mantis), Qilin (aka Pestilent Mantis), and Medusa (aka Venomous Mantis).
    • “According to a detailed report published by PRODAFT, the group, which it tracks as Phantom Mantis, is led by a Russian-speaking cybercriminal it calls LARVA-368, who goes by the online aliases hastalamuerte, ArmCorp, zeta88, nobody0, and santamuerte. The Gentlemen is known to be active since March 2025, claiming a total of 478 victims to date, per data from Ransomware.Live.”
  • Cybersecurity Insiders tells us,
    • “In recent years, ransomware has evolved from simple file-encrypting malware into highly sophisticated cyber weapons capable of disrupting entire organizations. Among these emerging threats, Time Bomb Ransomware has gained significant attention due to its ability to remain dormant within systems before launching a coordinated attack. This delayed-execution strategy makes it particularly dangerous for backup engines, which serve as the last line of defense against data loss and cyber incidents.
    • “Time Bomb Ransomware operates by infiltrating an organization’s network and remaining undetected for an extended period. Instead of immediately encrypting files, the malware silently spreads across systems, identifies critical assets, and waits for a predetermined trigger date or condition. 
    • “During this dormant phase, it can infect data backup repositories, storage servers, and disaster recovery environments without raising suspicion. As a result, organizations may unknowingly back up infected data for weeks or even months- depending on the backup engine configuration that can range on weekly to monthly time intervals.
    • “The primary danger lies in the ransomware’s ability to compromise backup engines before activating its payload. Traditional backup solutions are designed to create multiple copies of data to ensure business continuity. However, when ransomware infiltrates these backup systems, it can encrypt, corrupt, or delete backup copies along with the primary data. Consequently, organizations lose their ability to recover information, forcing them to either pay the ransom or suffer significant operational disruptions.”

From the Cybersecurity defenses front,

  • The Wall Street Journal reports,
    • “Frontier artificial intelligence models, like Anthropic’s Mythos, are forcing organizations to rethink cybersecurity by rapidly identifying attack chains.
    • “Visa developed a “Mean Time to Adapt” metric and the VVAH framework to automate vulnerability fixing and testing.
    • “Mean Time to Adapt,” measures how quickly an organization identifies, triages and fixes vulnerabilities once discovered.
    • “The rapid AI-driven discovery of flaws creates pressure on organizations, especially smaller vendors and the public sector, to automate defenses.”
  • JP Morgan Chase suggests ten actions to take now for AI-ready cyber resilience.
    • Run the Latest Software Versions
    • Manage Assets and Software Components with Reference Data
    • Build and Operate a Robust Vulnerability Management Program
    • Stress Test Incident Response and Resiliency Plans
    • Know Your Major SaaS and Outsourced Dependencies
    • Optimize Change Management for Speed
    • Aggressively Filter Outbound Traffic from Production Systems
    • Remove Standing Privileges from Employee Entitlements
    • Manage Remote Access and Segment Where Possible
    • Embed Security into the AI Development and Deployment Lifecycle
  • Bleeping Computer adds,
    • “AI is transforming the speed and scale of cybercrime in ways traditional security operations were never designed to handle.
    • “Gartner predicts AI agents will cut the time it takes to exploit account exposures by 50% by 2027. Phishing campaigns that once took days to craft can now be generated in minutes, free of the telltale errors that once gave them away, while vulnerabilities that once required manual reconnaissance can now be identified and exploited automatically.
    • “For MSPs, the stakes are clear. Those still relying on a fragmented security stack will not just be slower to respond but will also struggle to prove to clients that their environments are fully protected.
    • “Keeping pace with AI-driven threats requires a more unified, AI-powered approach that strengthens security, simplifies operations and delivers greater value without putting additional pressure on margins.’
  • CSO raises “15 tough cybersecurity questions every CISO must answer.”
  • Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

Monday report

David Ermer–Congress, FDA, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, NIH, Obesity, OPM, Rx coverage, U.S. Healthcare–

Simplicity is a virtue.

From Washington, DC

  • Roll Call takes a look at what’s ahead of Congress this week,
  • and also lets us know,
    • “President Donald Trump on Monday sent to the Senate the nomination of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to fill the role permanently, teeing up what could be a bruising confirmation process for a Trump ally who has drawn bipartisan criticism for recent Justice Department moves.”
  • Per a HHS news release,
    • “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Education today hosted eight of the nation’s leading accreditors, assessors, and medical organizations to announce a historic development to increase nutrition requirements at every level of U.S. medical education, competency-evaluation, training, and residency. Additionally, 19 medical schools across the country have signed the Trump administration’s Nutrition Education Pledge, vowing to incorporate 40 hours of nutritional education or its competency equivalent into graduation requirements starting this fall.
    • “Poor diets are the primary driver of America’s chronic disease epidemic, and today’s announcement reflects the shifting landscape toward placing nutrition and prevention at the core of patient health,” said Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Still, more work remains, and I look forward to seeing nutrition play an increased role as the latest science, data, and best practices develop.”
    • “Last August, HHS and the Department of Education sent a letter to medical organizations encouraging them to improve their standards and place nutrition at the core of their programs.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review informs us,
    • “TrumpRx.gov is adding 160 prescription drugs to the platform, bringing its total to more than 800  according to a June 5 Truth Social post from President Donald Trump.
    • “The president said the expansion would allow TrumpRx.gov to offer discounted pricing for medications that account for roughly four out of every five prescriptions filled in the U.S. The administration also claims the platform has saved American patients more than $400 million since its February launch.”
  • Per an OPM news release,
    • “The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) today announced additional leading technology companies have committed to partnering with the US Tech Force (Tech Force), the government-wide initiative to recruit top technologists to modernize the federal government and strengthen America’s technical workforce.
    • “The new industry partners include Arista Networks, Armada, Cisco, Cognition AI, Cognizant, Payward, Moveworks from ServiceNow, Scale AI, and Wiz.
    • “These companies will contribute to Tech Force by providing technical training resources, executive engagement and programming, nominating employees for temporary government service, and helping create paths for Tech Force alumni into the private sector.” * * *
    • “More information about Tech Force is available here.”
  • The American Hospital Association News reports,
    • “The Drug Enforcement Administration today released a final rule implementing provisions from the Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022, which passed as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, eliminating the need for a separate waiver for qualified practitioners to dispense certain types of controlled substances for medications for opioid use disorder treatment, or MOUD. While the original requirements were amended by the SUPPORT Act of 2018 and changes were implemented in an interim final rule in 2020, the 2022 legislation struck the amended section from regulation, thus requiring DEA to respond to public comments on the interim final rule and update regulatory language accordingly.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • Fierce Pharma informs us
    • “The FDA has expanded the label for Pfizer’s subcutaneous hemophilia drug Hympavzi, now including patients age 6 and older who have hemophilia A or B.
    • “The anti-tissue factor pathway inhibitor was initially approved in October of 2024 for those age 12 and older with hemophilia A or B who have not developed the antibodies—also known as inhibitors—produced by the immune system that block or destroy infused clotting factor medications.
    • “The new expansion covers all patients 6 and older, regardless of their inhibitor status. The new nod also opens up the treatment to those 12 and older who have developed the inhibitors.”
  • CBS News reports,
    • “Retatrutide isn’t supposed to be everywhere.
    • “Touted as the next generation in the GLP-1 craze, it’s an experimental weight-loss drug that is not authorized outside of clinical trials. The Food and Drug Administration hasn’t reviewed whether it is safe and effective, which is the legal path for prescription drugs to come to market. And yet retatrutide is for sale all over the internet, a phenomenon with no modern precedent.
    • “It isn’t just shadowy online vendors offering what they claim to be research-grade retatrutide.
    • “A CBS News investigation found dozens of clinics across the country, staffed by licensed physicians and nurse practitioners, openly advertising retatrutide. That practice defies a longstanding norm in medicine – to wait for the FDA to approve a drug before prescribing it – and is contributing to a booming commercial marketplace for a drug that is barred from sale by federal law.” * * *
    • “It’s on the states to really police this kind of conduct,” said Nathan Cortez, a professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, adding that they often lack enforcement resources. “At some point it becomes so blatant and widespread that, you’re wondering, ‘What are we doing here? Are we going to enforce the law or not?'”
  • The Wall Street Journal adds,
    • Eli Lilly LLY shares rose in early European trade after a late-stage trial showed its drug was effective in weight loss and in alleviating obesity-linked conditions.
    • “Shares jumped 4.4% premarket to $1,181, extending a record high hit at Friday’s market close. The stock is up over 30% since the Indiana-based company reported first-quarter earnings on April 30.
    • “Participants in a Phase 3 trial of retatrutide—an experimental drug targeting obesity-related hormones—showed substantial weight loss, with those taking 12 mg doses losing an average of around 70 pounds over an 80-week period, the company said.
    • ‘One-third of participants on 12 mg doses saw their weight fall into a healthy weight range, while two-thirds fell below the threshold for obesity, Eli Lilly said.”

From the judicial front,

  • The American Hospital Association News reports,
    • “The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts June 8 vacated the $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas established by a proclamation in September 2025. Judge Leo T. Sorkin declared the fees unlawful and said in his decision that it “exceeds the fee-setting authority delegated by Congress.” The AHA last year asked the administration to make healthcare personnel exempt from the fees. The federal government is likely to appeal the June 8 decision.”

Reports from the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting,

  • Fierce Pharma adds,
    • “With an obesity green light already in hand, Eli Lilly is pushing for its newly launched Foundayo (orforglipron) to break into Type 2 diabetes, in turn rounding out its oral offering in line with Novo Nordisk’s duo of GLP-1 pills in both indications. 
    • “Now, in results from a trio of pivotal phase 3 studies presented Monday at the American Diabetes Association 2026 Scientific Sessions, Lilly is aiming its diabetes data squarely at two of the oral GLP-1’s biggest potential rivals.
    • “Sure to grab the most attention at the conference are results from Achieve-3, a head-to-head trial in which Foundayo topped Novo’s oral semaglutide on metrics of blood sugar reduction and weight loss in T2D patients.” 
  • STAT News notes,
    • “AstraZeneca’s investigational GLP-1 pill showed promise in mid-stage obesity and diabetes studies, but it may still be too early to determine how it stacks up against oral treatments already on the market.
    • “In one Phase 2 trial of people with obesity, called VISTA, those on the highest dose of the drug, called elecoglipron, lost 11.2% of their weight after 36 weeks, when looking at all patients regardless of discontinuations, according to data presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association and published in the Lancet. (Eli Lilly’s pill Foundayo led to the same rate of weight loss in a Phase 3 study that lasted twice as long, but it’s hard to compare across trials in different phases.)”
    • “In a separate Phase 2 trial in people with diabetes, called SOLSTICE, patients on the highest dose saw up to a 1.74 percentage-point decrease in a measure of blood sugar called A1C after 26 weeks. The study, also published in the Lancet, enrolled people taking oral Ozempic open-label as a comparator group, and they experienced a smaller A1C decrease of 1.32 percentage points.”
  • The American Journal of Managed Care relates,
    • “A trio of studies presented at the American Diabetes Association 2026 Scientific Sessions has reframed the conversation of diet during pregnancy, pointing to diet quality, not just quantity, as a meaningful lever for managing gestational glycemia and postpartum metabolic risk. This is a conversation that has long been viewed through the narrow lens of weight gain and fetal growth.
    • “Across hundreds of pregnancies, researchers of 3 oral presentations found that higher intake of fiber, nonstarchy vegetables, and plant protein were independently associated with lower continuous glucose monitor (CGM) readings,1 while lower-carbohydrate diets in women with gestational diabetes improved glycemic control but raised micronutrient concerns.2 Perhaps most strikingly, women randomly assigned to a higher-complex carbohydrate diet during pregnancy still showed measurably lower postpartum glucose responses 2 months after delivery, suggesting that what a pregnant woman eats may matter long after the birth.3
    • “Together, these findings challenge prevailing assumptions about optimal gestational nutrition and open new questions about how prenatal dietary interventions might be designed to protect both mother and child over the long term.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • BioPharma Dive reports,
    • “Tango Therapeutics said Monday its experimental drug vopimetostat showed promise in a small trial in pancreatic cancer, with nearly all of the enrollees followed so far responding to a regimen that combined its medicine with Revolution Medicines’ closely watched treatment daraxonrasib.
    • “The data suggest vopimetostat outperformed daraxonrasib alone in a similar population of people whose disease had progressed after at least one treatment line and exceeded Wall Street expectations. The company plans to initiate a Phase 3 trial later this year testing the combination.” 
  • The American Medical Association lets us know what doctors wish their patient knew about diverticulitis.
    • “Diverticulitis can turn silent colon pouches into painful inflammation. But plenty of interventions are available, depending on severity of diverticulitis.”
  • Per a National Institutes of Health news release,
    • “By inducing specific patterns of activity in small portions of the brain in awake mice, researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have triggered a recalibration of neural connections that normally only occurs during sleep. This new approach offset the effects of sleep deprivation in memory tasks and revealed features of sleep that are key to its restorative effect.
    • “What we’re essentially doing is forcing sleep in a local region of the brain. While that part is solidifying memories and restoring learning capacity, other parts stay aware/vigilant and connected to environment,” said corresponding author Chiara Cirelli, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Dolphins do something similar, sleeping with only one brain hemisphere at a time.”
    • “Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, which makes up about 80% of sleep for adults, is when the junctions between neurons that make memories are evaluated. During this phase, the brain protects important connections for long-term storage, prunes those that are less necessary, and makes space for new ones.”
  • Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News relates,
    • “A study tracking thousands of B cells across more than 100 germinal centers (GCs) in mice has revealed how the system consistently produces highly effective antibodies. The findings overturn longstanding ideas about how germinal centers function, revealing that they are far more selective than once thought, and challenge the idea that antibody improvement is driven mainly by rare growth “bursts” among the most successful B cells. The discovery could have implications for immune cell evolution, and ultimately guide the design of vaccines against rapidly mutating pathogens like influenza. It could also lead to new ways of studying evolution itself.
    • “The traditional, mechanistic view of germinal centers is to think of them as selection machines sorting out the best antibodies,” said research lead Gabriel D. Victora, PhD, head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Dynamics at The Rockefeller University. “But when you look very, very closely, you see a process that’s almost essentially random—a little bit better than a coin toss—which repeats many times until the immune system arrives at the right answer consistently. That’s much more akin to how evolution operates than the way a machine does.”
    • “Victora and colleagues reported on their findings in Cell, in a paper titled “Replaying germinal center evolution on a quantified affinity landscape.”
  • Medscape points out,
    • “Metabolic-bariatric surgery (MBS) in patients aged 65 years or older resulted in long-term meaningful weight loss and remission of obesity-related conditions, although complication rates of about 8% were noted.”
  • The Cancer Therapy Advisor notes,
    • “Hyperthyroidism may be associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, particularly premenopausal breast cancer, according to research published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
    • “Findings from in vitro studies have indicated that thyroid hormones can have estrogen-like effects. That suggests that thyroid hormones may affect cellular proliferation of breast tissue and subsequently increase breast cancer risk in people with hyperthyroidism, researchers explained. In this study, the researchers assessed the effects of hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism on incident breast cancer in women from the Sister Study.
    • “Women diagnosed with hyperthyroidism or receiving related treatment may have elevated BC [breast cancer] risk, particularly premenopausal BC,” the researchers concluded. “Although more research is needed, premenopausal women treated for hyperthyroidism may benefit from enhanced breast cancer screening.”

From the U.S. healthcare business and artificial intelligence front,

  • Fierce Healthcare reports,
    • “Medicare Advantage insurer Essence Healthcare is continuing to build out its partnership with Oura and has unveiled a new clinical program that aims to identify potential sleep apnea risk.
    • “Essence is rolling out a new clinical workflow that will arm physicians with insights into patients’ nighttime breathing habits to identify those who may be at risk for obstructive sleep apnea. The insurer offers the ring as a covered benefit through some of its plans and has been working with Oura’s team to identify more clinical applications for its data.
    • “News of the partnership expansion was shared first with Fierce Healthcare.
    • “Through the program, insights into members’ sleep, as identified by the Oura Ring, will be shared with Essence with the patients’ consent. The insurer then uses Lumeris’ Tom platform to reach out to at-risk individuals and guide them through STOP-BANG, a common evidence-based screening for sleep apnea.”
  • and
    • “Artificial intelligence is here to stay in healthcare, and the industry’s largest players, like CVS Health, are making huge commitments to the tech.
    • “But embracing AI requires a workforce that’s ready for the revolution. With that backdrop, CVS has rolled out its internal AI Learning Academy, which aims to educate its workforce on practical applications for the technology and how it can impact and improve their workflows.
    • “The program was built in collaboration between human resources and tech leaders at the company. Greg Karanastasis, senior vice president for talent and development at CVS, told Fierce Healthcare that the aim was to build something bigger than just a training program.”
  • Per an Institute for Clinical and Economic Research (ICER) news release,
  • MedCity News tells us about “The 3 Biggest Roadblocks to Egg Freezing — and How Providers Are Working to Remove Them.”
    • “Egg freezing has gained popularity as a fertility preservation tool, but experts say high costs, uncertain outcomes and timing challenges continue to deter many women from pursuing it.”
  • MedTech Dive informs us,
    • “Boston Scientific is investing approximately $138 million to build a 500,000-square-foot distribution facility in Plainfield, Indiana.
    • “Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, who announced the project last week, said Boston Scientific will break ground on the facility this year and ultimately create up to 300 jobs. 
    • “Boston Scientific is building the facility to complement its existing distribution network, which includes sites in Georgia, Massachusetts and Minnesota.”
  • BioPharma Dive notes,
    • “Incyte, a drugmaker with a heavy focus on blood diseases and cancers, plans to take control of an experimental medicine that could help control bleeding in a variety of disorders.
    • “Vega Therapeutics, a subsidiary of the “hub-and-spoke” biotech Star Therapeutics, has been developing this “VGA039” medicine primarily as a treatment for von Willebrand disease — the most common inherited bleeding disorder. Now, Incyte has agreed to buy Vega for $1.25 billion up front. Star would be eligible to receive as much as $750 million more if certain sales goals are eventually met.
    • “Patients with von Willebrand disease lack an important clotting protein, meaning that, when they suffer any kind of injury, the bleeding usually takes longer to stop. In severe cases, this bleeding can cause joint or organ damage and be life-threatening. Current preventative treatments include so-called factor replacement therapies given as intravenous infusions two to three times a week. VGA039, meanwhile, comes as a once-monthly, under-the-skin injection that patients can do themselves.”
  • The Wall Street Journal relates,
    • “Roche Holding struck a deal with Nurix Therapeutics NRIX to license an experimental blood-cancer drug for up to $2.3 billion, expanding its pipeline in oncology and potentially other therapeutic areas.
    • The Swiss drugmaker on Monday said it would make an upfront cash payment to Nurix of $700 million, with additional payments subject to the drug, bexobrutideg, reaching development, regulatory and sales targets.
    • Bexobrutideg is due to enter late-stage studies for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia this summer, Roche said.
    • “The main opportunity for us is in B-cell malignancies. There are many B-cell malignancies and the most dominant of interest for us is chronic lymphocytic leukemia,” Roche’s deputy chief medical officer, Stefan Frings, said in an interview.
    • “The company said the medicine has potential to offer higher efficacy and more favorable tolerability than established therapies for leukemia. The drug is a so-called BTK degrader designed to remove the BTK enzyme from cells, rather than blocking its effects, and overcome resistance.”
  • and
    • “Johnson & Johnson JNJ  has agreed to buy biotechnology company Firefly Bio for $1 billion in cash in a deal that bolsters the drugmaker’s oncology pipeline.
    • “J&J on Monday said Firefly is developing its proprietary Firelink degrader antibody conjugate platform, for KRAS-driven cancers, which have limited treatment options with survival measured in months.
    • “Mutations of the KRAS gene have long been considered undruggable because the gene’s structure lacks the deep binding pockets most drugs need.
    • ‘J&J said the Firelink platform is a novel approach to overcome limitations of existing treatments by delivering a highly selective protein degrader to tumor cells, while avoiding healthy cells.”
  • and
    • “Novo Nordisk NOVO.B said prescriptions for its Wegovy weight-loss pill have surpassed three million since launching in early January.
    • “The Danish drugmaker said late Sunday that the pill hit one million prescriptions 12 weeks after reaching U.S. pharmacies and online providers, with a further two million prescriptions achieved in the following 10 weeks.
    • “More than 80% of new prescriptions filled for the Wegovy pill are for patients new to the GLP-1 class of drugs, which the company says indicates that the new oral formulation is expanding the obesity treatment market, rather than replacing existing injectable therapies.”
  • Fierce Pharma adds,
    • “On a weekly basis, total GLP-1 prescriptions were trending downward over the week of June 1, falling 5.7% week-over-week, Citi analysts noted. Other than the continued rollout of Lilly and Novo’s respective weight loss pills, the analysts cited the effect of the Trump administration’s “most favored nation” pricing policies as a key future event that they think could impact total prescriptions.” 

Noteworthy Death

  • AP reports
    • “Harvard University professor Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who championed the cause of children grappling with poverty and segregation, has died at 97, his son said Sunday.
    • “The son, also named Robert Coles, told The Associated Press that his father died Thursday at a hospice center in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
    • “The elder Coles was famed for documenting the needs of children, particularly those caught in the crucible of social upheaval. The second and third parts of his five-volume “Children of Crisis” won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for general nonfiction.
    • “In a 1965 Washington Post essay, he wrote that, expecting to find many psychiatric problems among the children of poverty, that instead “I was constantly surprised at the endurance shown by children we would all call poor or, in the current fashion, ‘culturally disadvantaged.’”
  • RIP

Cybersecurity Saturday

David Ermer–Cybersecurity, Generative AI–

From the War with Iran front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI and other federal authorities warned Tuesday [June 2] that hackers have targeted automatic tank gauge systems in threat activity across multiple industry sectors.
    • “Tank gauge, or ATG, systems are used to measure temperature, check fuel or other liquid levels and detect leaks, according to guidance released by the agencies. Hackers have targeted internet-exposed devices and used command execution to disable alerts or otherwise obscure the monitoring of these devices.” * * *
    • “Federal authorities have not attributed the attacks to any specific group, but CNN previously reported an investigation into the hack of ATG systems that serve gas stations in multiple U.S. states. The threat activity is suspected to be connected to Iran-linked hackers, but federal officials are not publicly making that link. 
    • “OT security experts cautioned there are limits to how a hacker might manipulate these devices. 
    • “A malicious actor could take control of an ATG and disrupt its functions, including leak detection, but they cannot cause a leak with an ATG,” said Markus Mueller, field CISO at Nozomi Networks. “Similarly, a malicious actor could disrupt the ability to fill or use a tank to fill a vehicle.” 

From the Project Glasswing front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “Anthropic is significantly expanding the number of organizations that have access to its powerful Claude Mythos Preview AI model, a move that reflects growing interest in Mythos’s vulnerability-hunting capabilities within government agencies and critical infrastructure sectors.
    • “Following several weeks of close collaboration with our Project Glasswing partners, the security industry, open-source software maintainers, and the U.S. government, we’re extending the partnership to approximately 150 new organizations,” Anthropic said in a statement on Tuesday [June 2].
    • “The new organizations, which are based in more than 15 countries, include infrastructure operators in sectors that weren’t represented in Project Glasswing’s membership, such as power, water, healthcare and telecommunications. Other new members include hardware vendors and critical software maintainers, including nonprofit groups.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review adds,
    • “Health system leaders told Becker’s they’re encouraged by AI developer Anthropic opening up its Project Glasswing cybersecurity initiative to healthcare.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive notes,
    • One of the most important jobs for CISOs in the AI era is to stay calm and carefully assess their organizations’ risk exposure, experts said this week at the annual Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit here.
    • “Don’t panic,” Katell Thielemann, a VP analyst at Gartner, said during a talk on Tuesday about AI’s impact on the security of cyber-physical systems such as industrial control equipment.
    • “Yes, things are changing fast,” Thielemann said, “but there are some low-hanging fruit” that CISOs can tackle, such as disconnecting critical devices from the internet and monitoring remote access to the remaining infrastructure.

From the cybersecurity policy front,

  • Cyberscoop reports,
    • “The Trump administration issued a revised executive order Tuesday [June 2] focused on artificial intelligence, offering a significantly pared-back vision for the federal government’s role vetting AI systems compared with a draft version that was spiked weeks ago.
    • “The order keeps in place the administration’s largely voluntary framework for companies to engage with the federal government around testing new models before release, but appears to considerably weaken or loosen provisions that had been opposed by industry.
    • “Under the order, AI companies would voluntarily provide the federal government access to frontier models before release, but now it will be for “up to” 30 days instead of the 90-day timeline included in previous drafts.
    • “It also explicitly states that nothing in the program will be construed as mandatory or part of a federal licensing or permitting regime, and gives AI companies significant influence to help define what models would and would not be covered under for testing.
    • “It also states that all federal testing and access to the models would be subject to “confidentiality, cybersecurity, insider-risk, and intellectual-property protection, use, and nondisclosure requirements.”
  • Federal News Network relates,
    • During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wednesday June 3, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “said the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency needs to hire hundreds of additional staff. CISA’s staff has gone from roughly 3,400 people to 2,200 under the Trump administration, with many taking deferred resignations or early retirements.
    • “We probably need somewhere around [2,800] if we can actually have the partnerships we need with states and to be able to use the grants, the monies that stayed with CISA to be able to invest with local and state municipalities,” Mullin said. “We’re not going to fail on the mission that we have in front of us, and cyber attacks are only getting stronger, and they’re attacking our private partnership the most.”
    • “Mullin’s comments somewhat conflict with the Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request for CISA, which would reduce the agency’s budget by $707 million compared to 2025 spending levels.” * * *
    • “Mullin also teased that Trump may be close to naming a new CISA director nominee. Former DHS official Sean Plankey’s nomination for CISA director was rescinded earlier this year after facing lengthy delays in the Senate.
    • “We’ve got a person soon to be nominated that will be running CISA that has the ability to recruit and focus on the authorities we have,” Mullin said. “We want CISA to be the leader in cybersecurity. They should be, and they will be.”
  • The American Hospital Association News tells us,
    • “The Health Sector Coordinating Council’s Cybersecurity Working Group has released a guide to help healthcare organizations establish cyber governance frameworks for secure artificial intelligence implementation. The guide addresses challenges in identifying and mitigating AI-specific cyber risks, including data poisoning, model drift and adversarial attacks, while ensuring compliance with current regulations. It also explores a spectrum of AI technologies used in healthcare, including traditional machine learning models, generative AI and agentic AI systems capable of autonomous action. 
    • “This comprehensive guide is a must-read for all healthcare organizations, vendors and suppliers as the development and implementation of various forms of AI into healthcare settings has become widespread at tremendous speed and scale,” said John Riggi, AHA national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “The secure-by-design and implementation recommendations offered in this guide will help mitigate unintended cybersecurity risk and consequences of AI use in healthcare and help prevent adversarial exploitation of AI-related technical flaws. Mitigating AI cybersecurity risk is part of cyber safety, and cyber safety is patient safety.” 

From the cybersecurity vulnerabilities and breaches front,

  • Bleeping Computer reports,
    • “A data breach at the dental benefits administrator DentaQuest has reportedly exposed the sensitive data of 2.6 million accounts.
    • “The security incident came to light last month, when the infamous extortion group ShinyHunters listed the company on its data leak site and claimed to have stolen more than 234 GB of data.
    • “Following what the threat actor describes as a failure to reach an agreement with the company, the data was publicly leaked.” * * *
    • “On June 2, DentaQuest confirmed on its website that its networks had been breached and the incident caused “limited disruption” in customer service.
    • “DentaQuest is actively managing a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to a limited portion of our network,” reads the statement.” * * *
    • “Yesterday, [June 3], data breach alerting service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) analyzed the leaked information and found that it contained records for 2.6 million accounts.”
  • The HIPAA Journal has been keeping track of all healthcare data breaches since 2009.
    • “There was a sharp increase in data breaches between 2018 and 2021, with data breaches doubling in just three years as cybercriminals aggressively adopted ransomware and actively targeted the healthcare sector. The large annual increases in data breaches came to an end in 2021, increasing by around 4% between 2022 and 2023, and again by around 4% from 2024 to 2025, when a new annual record was set with 772 large data breaches reported.”
  • CISA added five known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • Cybersecurity Dive adds,
    • “Cisco on Thursday [June 4] warned of a zero-day vulnerability in its Catalyst SD-WAN product that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root. 
    • “The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245, is the result of insufficient validation of user-supplied input. The flaw, which has a severity score of 7.8, could allow an attacker to conduct command-injection attacks and elevate privileges as the root user. 
    • “The company said it has confirmed a limited number of cases where the flaw was exploited, leading to a configuration change being pushed to edge devices.”
    • “Cisco has thus far not released any patches and has no current workarounds. 
    • “The vulnerability was disclosed by Mandiant.” 
  • and
    • “Researchers on Monday [June 1] warned that more than 30 Red Hat npm packages have been compromised in a supply-chain attack that used a credential-stealing worm. 
    • A total of 96 versions across 32 packages have been identified as compromised, according to researchers at Aikido Security. The accumulated downloads exceed 116,000, according to researchers. 
    • “The packages were published through the GitHub Actions OIDC, which indicates the compromise was linked to the continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline, instead of a npm token, researchers noted.” 
  • The American Hospital Association News informs us,
    • “The FBI and international agencies have released an alert on Chinese military intelligence services using professional networking sites and online job platforms to target government, military and any other personnel with access to classified or privileged information. The agencies said intelligence officers or affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, research institutions or human resources firms, and post job advertisements online for foreign policy and defense analysts. Successful candidates are then pressured to provide “non-public” information for unspecified clients associated with the Chinese government.
    • “This alert is important for healthcare since many individuals in the sector have current or former access to classified information,” said John Riggi, AHA national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “Many healthcare organizations are also engaged in highly sensitive, taxpayer-funded medical research, innovation and clinical trials. For decades, the Chinese government has been engaged in an aggressive campaign to legitimately acquire, steal or hack the results of this research and innovation for their own strategic national security priorities, economic advantage or weaponization. Use of social media platforms to engage and compromise individuals with access to classified or unclassified, but sensitive information is one of their most effective tactics. As such, we should remain wary of connecting with unknown individuals on these platforms seeking to discuss research, or provide unusually lucrative offers for employment, speaking engagements, opinions or research — especially those which may involve foreign contacts or travel.”
  • Dark Reading identifies “4 Critical Threats Where Attackers Have the Advantage
    • “Gartner analysts issued a call to action to bolster defenses against several emerging critical threats, such as deepfakes and prompt injections.”

From the ransomware front,

  • Industrial Cyber reports,
    • “Microsoft Threat Intelligence detailed a growing RaaS (ransomware-as-a-service) operation known as The Gentlemen, tracked by Microsoft as Storm-2697, warning that the threat combines strong file encryption with aggressive self-propagation capabilities that can compromise entire enterprise networks. The analysis disclosed that the Go-based ransomware uses per-file ephemeral key encryption built on Curve25519 and XChaCha20, while simultaneously leveraging multiple lateral movement techniques to spread across connected systems, significantly increasing the speed and impact of attacks once initial access is obtained. 
    • “Researchers mentioned that The Gentlemen emerged in mid-2025 before evolving into a RaaS platform that recruits affiliates to conduct attacks at scale. The company noted that the malware’s self-propagation module enables broad network compromise, making it more dangerous than conventional ransomware focused solely on file encryption. The operation has been linked to widespread attacks across multiple sectors and regions, with threat actors using the ransomware alongside data theft and extortion tactics to maximize pressure on victims. 
    • “In addition to using per-file ephemeral Curve25519 keys with XChaCha20 stream cipher, The Gentlemen ransomware attempts to spread across an environment using a series of simultaneous, distinct lateral movement methods, increasing likelihood of widespread impact once initial access is achieved. Microsoft has observed The Gentlemen ransomware impacting organizations across education, transportation, healthcare, and financial industries in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.”
  • Bleeping Computer relates,
    • “A threat actor is using an AI-built ransomware attack toolkit that automates Active Directory discovery and helps evade endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions.
    • “Tool and payload development was assisted by Cursor and Claude Opus agents in various stages, including initial coding, analysis, and revisioning. Additionally, some agents were tasked with checking security research posts for various bypass techniques.
    • “Some of the malware created this way was tested in virtual environments against EDR tools from Sophos, CrowdStrike, and Microsoft.
    • “Despite the malware research and development orchestrated using AI technology, the researchers note that the workflow is entirely human-driven.”
  • Cybersecurity Insiders informs us,
    • “The traditional pattern of ransomware attacks appears to be changing, according to a recent analysis published by Ransomnews. For years, cybersecurity experts observed that many ransomware groups preferred launching attacks during weekends, particularly on Fridays and Sundays, when organizations often operated with reduced staffing levels.
    • “However, new data suggests that cybercriminals have shifted their tactics and are now focusing more heavily on weekdays, especially between Monday and Friday.
    • “The research indicates that ransomware incidents are increasingly occurring during standard European business hours rather than late at night or during weekends. This marks a significant departure from previous attack strategies, which were designed to exploit periods when IT teams and security personnel were less likely to be available to respond quickly.
    • “According to the findings, Sunday has become the least active day for ransomware-related activity. In contrast, October stands out as the busiest month of the year, recording the highest number of ransomware attacks. While the reasons behind the October surge are not entirely clear, experts believe that threat actors may take advantage of increased business activity during the final quarter of the year, when organizations are often focused on meeting annual targets and may have less time to dedicate to cybersecurity preparedness.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “CrowdStrike reported better-than-expected earnings during the fiscal first quarter, as accelerating demand for AI is pushing more enterprises to focus on tighter cybersecurity controls. 
    • “CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said demand for AI and the introduction of Anthropic’s Mythos created an inflection point that demonstrated to the market that cybersecurity is an essential part of the AI ecosystem. 
    • “AI has now directly entered the world of cybersecurity across two dimensions,” Kurtz said during the company earnings call Wednesday. “First, you need cybersecurity to secure AI itself. Deploying AI across the enterprise is simply too risky without cybersecurity from the start.” * * *
    • The company said revenue increased 26%, to $1.39 billion, during the fiscal first quarter ended April 30, compared with year-ago revenue of $1.1 billion. * * *
    • “On Tuesday, CrowdStrike rival Palo Alto Networks reported a 31% increase in revenue, to $3 billion, during the company’s fiscal third quarter. 
    • “These results are materializing as AI fundamentally redefines the enterprise tech stack, elevating cybersecurity to a mission-critical priority for every organization,” Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, said during his company conference call on Tuesday.”
  • Dark Reading points out “Cyber Insurance Rates Are Dropping, but Exclusions Widen.”
    • “Cyber insurance coverage is slowly changing, and some policies may not provide coverage for social engineering attacks like ClickFix.”
  • Tech Target calls attention to “Lost in translation: Cybersecurity board reporting for CISOs.”
    • “Cybersecurity board reports don’t always land. At the Security and Risk Management Summit 2026, Gartner analysts suggested a novel way to communicate cyber-risk to corporate directors.”
  • A Cybersecurity Dive commentator delves into “Turning tension into collaboration: How CIOs and CISOs can lead together.”
    • If properly managed and channeled, age-old friction between IT and cybersecurity can create a more resilient organization.
  • Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

Friday report

David Ermer–CDC, CMS, Congress, COVID-19, FDA, Federal employment benefits, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, Medicare, No Surprises Act, OPM, Patient safety, Telehealth, U.S. Healthcare–

Simplicity is a virtue

From Washington, DC,

  • The American Hospital Association News reports,
    • “The House Appropriations Committee June 4 released the fiscal year 2027 appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and related agencies. The bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $189.3 billion. HHS is provided with $110.8 billion, which is $4 billion, or 4%, below the FY 2026 enacted level. The bill provides support for rural health, primary care, workforce, behavioral health and other programs. The appropriations subcommittee approved the bill today on a party-line basis, and additional details are expected to be released before a full committee markup currently scheduled for June 9.” 
  • Beckers Payers Issues relates
    • “CMS has logged nearly 40,000 complaints alleging potential violations of federal health insurance law since the agency began tracking them in 2022, with the vast majority of closed complaints related to the No Surprises Act, according to an enforcement report covering data through December 2025.
    • “The report tracked complaints under Title XXVII of the Public Health Service Act, which includes the NSA, Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, and ACA compliance. 
    • “The agency closed 15,145 complaints in total, which were defined broadly to include stakeholder feedback, congressional and state referrals, No Surprises Help Desk submissions, and news articles. Of those, 2,086 were closed with a violation found and 7,838 with no violation found; the remainder were duplicates or withdrawals. Complaints referred to other agencies were not included in the data.”
  • FedSmith tells us,
    • “The average federal employee salary has reached a record high, exceeding $112,000 for the first time according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. For critics, that figure may confirm a long-held belief that government employees are overpaid. For supporters of federal employees, it reflects the reality of an aging, highly educated workforce that performs increasingly complex work.” * * *
    • “The average federal employee salary has reached a record high, exceeding $112,000 for the first time according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. For critics, that figure may confirm a long-held belief that government employees are overpaid. For supporters of federal employees, it reflects the reality of an aging, highly educated workforce that performs increasingly complex work.”
  • KFF informs us
    • Three new KFF analyses examine the latest data about Medicare Advantage, including trends in enrollment, premiums, out-of-pocket limits, supplemental benefits and prior authorization.
    • The first analysis, focusing on enrollment trends, finds that 55% of eligible Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage in 2026, though the pace of enrollment growth continued to slow. Nearly one quarter (23%) of Medicare Advantage enrollees are in special needs plans (SNPs), which limit enrollment to beneficiaries with specialized health needs or who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. Most (85%) of the net increase in Medicare Advantage enrollment between 2025 and 2026 across all plan types was among SNPs. Medicare Advantage enrollment remains highly concentrated, with UnitedHealth Group leading the market, and, together with Humana, accounting for nearly half (46%) of all Medicare Advantage enrollees nationwide, the same as last year.
    • A companion analysis finds that three quarters (75%) of enrollees in individual Medicare Advantage plans with prescription drug coverage pay no premium other than the Medicare Part B premium, a selling point for enrollees. Nearly a third of enrollees (31%) are in plans that also reduce the Part B premium. Nearly all Medicare Advantage enrollees (99%) are in plans that require prior authorization for some services. Most Medicare Advantage enrollees are in plans that offer supplemental benefits not covered by traditional Medicare, such as vision, hearing and dental. Access to those three benefits remained stable, though there were decreases in the share of enrollees in plans providing other benefits, such as over-the-counter benefits, meals, and transportation.
    • Also recently available is a KFF analysis with a more detailed examination of out-of-pocket limits in Medicare Advantage plans in 2026, including variation by plan type, the distribution of enrollees facing different out-of-pocket limits, and trends over time.

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • The Wall Street Journal reports,
    • “The Food and Drug Administration launched a safety study of the abortion pill mifepristone, potentially leading to restrictions on its distribution.
    • “The FDA study, using existing drug-safety systems, is expected to take six months and aims to withstand legal criticism.
    • “Antiabortion advocates target mifepristone’s mail and telehealth distribution rules; 65% of U.S. abortions use the pill.”
  • Fierce Pharma relates,
    • “Three times as many deaths in the study arm versus the control arm in a trial of ADC Therapeutics’ Zynlonta have raised questions about the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), which has been on the market since the FDA granted it accelerated approval in 2021.
    • “In the phase 3 LOTIS-5 trial, which included 440 patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), there were 27 deaths (13.2%) in the study arm compared to nine (4.6%) in the control group. Zynlonta was paired with Roche’s monoclonal antibody Rituxan, while those in the control arm received Rituxan plus the chemotherapies gemcitabine and oxaliplatin.
    • “Most of the deaths in the treatment arm were among patients age 75 and older and were due to infections, ADC execs said on a conference call on Wednesday. The company added that the higher rate could also be chalked up to extended monitoring of patients in the treatment arm as opposed to those in the control arm.”
  • Healio tells us,
    • “The FDA has approved a label expansion for the interleukin-23 inhibitor guselkumab to include the inhibition of structural joint damage progression in adults with psoriatic arthritis.
    • “The label update follows data from the APEX trial, in which guselkumab (Tremfya, Janssen) yielded significantly lower rates of radiographic progression compared with placebo at 24 weeks. The analysis, which was published by Philip J. Mease, MD, of Swedish Medical Center and the University of Washington, and colleagues in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases in December, included more than 1,000 biologic-naïve adults with active PsA.”

From the judicial front,

  • Per a Justice Department news release,
    • “The Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division today [June 4] announced that its Health Care Fraud Unit, one of the most active white-collar litigating components across the Department, secured federal jury trial convictions in six trials in just under three weeks. The convictions in six trials between May 13 and June 1 spanned federal courtrooms across the United States, including in Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York and Nashville.
    • “Six trial convictions in under three weeks ties the Health Care Fraud Unit record for number of trials to result in a conviction in a single month period. The cases behind these recent convictions, however, represent a greater level of sophistication and complexity: more than $1.1 billion in fraud losses across six distinct schemes, including a digital health platform that industrialized Medicare fraud at national scale, a proactive data-driven prosecution of a physician who out-billed every other Medicare provider in the country for Botox, and prosecutions requiring simultaneous command of health care data analytics, financial forensics, sophisticated digital evidence, and expert testimony. These results reflect not merely the volume of trials but the caliber of the Fraud Division’s trial practice that carried each one of them to conviction. The Health Care Fraud Unit has completed nine trials to date in 2026 (all of which have resulted in convictions) and 17 trials in 2025, maintaining an extraordinary pace of white-collar trial activity.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced,
    • “As of June 5, 2026, the amount of acute respiratory illness causing people to seek health care is very low.
    • “RSV activity is low in most areas of the country. Emergency department visits and hospitalizations for RSV are highest among infants and children younger than 4 years old.
    • “COVID-19 activity is low in most areas of the country.
    • “Seasonal influenza activity is low.” * * *
    • “Parainfluenza virus (PIV) is elevated nationally. Human metapneumovirus (HMPV) and Rhinovirus/enterovirus (RV/EV) activities are elevated nationally but are beginning to decrease. CDC data show these trends are expected for this time of year. HMPV, PIV, and RV/EV are like other viruses that cause respiratory infections, including cough, fever, nasal congestion, and shortness of breath. Severe infection due to HMPV, PIV or RV/EV may progress to bronchitis or pneumonia. There are no vaccines available for these illnesses. Prevention measures include hand washing, cleaning surfaces, and staying home when sick.”
  • The Hill reports,
    • “The number of U.S. measles cases in 2026 has now exceeded 2,000, quickly approaching the full annual total of last year.
    • “As of June 4, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed 2,030 cases so far this year, with 93 percent — or 1,890 cases — associated with outbreaks. Throughout all of 2025, the CDC confirmed 2,288 measles cases. Thirty new measles outbreaks have been confirmed this year.”
  • STAT News relates,
    • “Americans who have high-risk exposures to Ebola in the current outbreak in Central Africa will have access to an antibody treatment that has shown great promise in animal testing but hasn’t yet undergone a clinical trial to show whether it is efficacious in people, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Thursday.
    • “The antibody treatment, known as MBP-134, is made by San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceuticals, with funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, an agency within HHS that helps develop medical countermeasures for rare and emerging diseases, and biological threats.
    • “It is not clear how many doses of MBP-134 exist at present. STAT asked the company and was told Mapp Bio could not reveal the number because BARDA owned the doses.
    • “An American doctor who contracted Ebola in the outbreak zone was flown last month to Germany for care; his wife, also a doctor, and their four children were also taken to Germany for quarantine. The ill physician, Peter Stafford, remains in care but is reportedly recovering. Another doctor from the same Christian missionary group who had what was considered a high-risk exposure is in quarantine in the Czech Republic; he remains healthy. There are currently no other known exposures among Americans.
    • “An expert panel advising the World Health Organization on possible therapeutics that could be tested or used in this outbreak — occurring in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring Uganda — deemed MBP-134 one of the products to be prioritized for testing.”
  • Health Day tells us,
    • “The age-adjusted Parkinson disease death rate among adults aged 65 years and older declined from 2021 to 2024, according to a June 4 data brief published by the National Center for Health Statistics.
    • “Ellen A. Kramarow, Ph.D., from the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, and colleagues used data from the National Vital Statistics System to examine trends in Parkinson disease mortality among adults aged 65 years and older in the United States.
    • “The researchers found that for adults aged 65 years and older, the age-adjusted Parkinson disease death rate was 72.0 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2024. From 2014 through 2021, there was an increase in Parkinson disease death rates, from 57.2 to 76.3, followed by a decline, with the rate lower in 2024 than in 2021. Higher Parkinson disease death rates were seen for men than women in each age group (65 to 74, 75 to 84, and 85 years and older) in 2024. Compared with other race and Hispanic origin groups, White non-Hispanic adults had the highest death rates from Parkinson disease. There was variation seen in Parkinson disease death rates by state of residence, ranging from 47.7 to 102.1 in New York and Utah, respectively.”
  • and
    • “Rurality is associated with worse epilepsy outcomes, although the associations are attenuated among privately insured patients, according to a study published online June 3 in Neurology.
    • “Edward R. Bader, M.B., Ch.B., from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study using the National Inpatient Sample for 2016 to 2021 to examine the association between rurality and epilepsy outcomes.” * * *
    • “The reduction in disparities among people with private insurance suggests that there may be other factors, not just where someone lives, that could be contributing to these differences,” Bader said in a statement. “Our study highlights the need for additional research and public health efforts aimed at improving access to epilepsy care for people living in rural areas, which might include the expansion of telehealth services.”
  • MedPage Today informs us,
    • “A study of women undergoing breast imaging showed a significantly lower incidence of breast cancer in those who had a history of treatment with GLP-1 agonists.
    • “Involving more than 30,000 women, the study showed an overall breast cancer rate of 1.97%, including 1.62% in patients who received GLP-1 agonists for overweight or obesity and 2.31% in those who did not. The difference represented a 30% lower risk of breast cancer in the GLP-1 group.
    • “The findings, combined with multiple other studies, have provided impetus for a prospective clinical trial of GLP-1 drugs to prevent breast cancer, reported Elizabeth S. McDonald, MD, PhD, of Penn Medicine and Abramson Cancer Center in Philadelphia, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting.
    • “Observational data cannot establish a causal relationship,” said McDonald. “We are seeing signals at this meeting in multiple cancers — colon, lung, liver, leukemia, endometrial, multiple myeloma — for decreased progression to metastatic disease, decreased recurrence, decreased incidence, and increased survival. The time is now to invest in a clinical trial to see if these drugs are causal for cancer prevention.”
  • Medscape points out,
    • “Patients discontinuing GLP-1 treatments often regain weight rapidly, but emerging strategies like endoscopic procedures and new oral medications show promise in maintaining weight loss. These alternatives may offer cost-effective, long-term solutions.”
  • Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News lets us know,
    • “The injectable form of the polio vaccine has proven effective at preventing illness but it does not block the transmission of the virus as well as the oral version of the vaccine. That is because the virus is usually transmitted through contaminated food or water and is first exposed to the GI tract, where the oral vaccine induces a mucosal immune response. To date, several countries no longer use the oral vaccine because there is a small risk of infection. It is also possible for people who receive the injected polio vaccine to spread the virus even though they are asymptomatic. 
    • “Now according to data from an Massachusetts Institute of Technology-led study, it may be possible to modify the injectable vaccine so that it can also promote a mucosal immune response. This way, the vaccine could support polio eradication efforts without the risks of the oral polio vaccine. Details are published in a new Science Advances paper titled “Am80-Lipid nanoparticles serve as an enteric mucosal adjuvant 3 following parenteral immunization with inactivated polio vaccine.”
  • Cardiovascular Business notes,
    • “Engineers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that uses ultrasound to stimulate the heart. The group shared its early experience with the device in Nature Biomedical Engineering, highlighting its compact, wearable design.
    • “Pacemakers are one of the most important and widely used human implants, and they have saved millions of lives,” Gengxi Lu, the study’s co-corresponding author, said in a statement. “But they are invasive, and they make direct contact with the beating heart. The dream for many years has been noninvasive heart stimulation with ultrasound.”
    • “The team’s device is a small sticker worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker use ultrasound pulses to stimulate the heart in a way that opens certain ion channels in cardiac cells. Lab experiments have been a success, with the device maintaining healthy contractions in human cardiac cells.
    • “For an ultrasound pacemaker to become a reality, researchers believe they would likely begin the process by giving patient’s a one-time injection that boosts the sensitivity of cardiac cells. Once this injection was done, the patient could then theoretically attach the stamp-sized sticker and start experiencing the benefits of the small device right away.
    • “While it’s still early, the group at MIT is optimistic about this new-look pacemaker’s potential. In fact, they hope to combine this latest approach with previous research into sticker-based medical imaging to deliver a single ultrasound sticker that can simultaneously monitor and regulate a patient’s heart.”
  • Per BioPharma Dive,
    • “A clinical trial testing a migraine prevention therapy from Denmark-based Lundbeck has produced data that some on Wall Street see as mixed but still good enough to forge ahead with further development.
    • “The therapy, called bocunebart, is designed to inhibit a nervous system protein known as PACAP. This protein regulates stress and, when triggered, causes pain-sensing nerves to fire and blood vessels in the head to drastically widen. Lundbeck’s study has been evaluating bocunebart — as a direct infusion to the veins or as an under-the-skin shot — in hundreds of patients who continued experiencing migraines even after trying up to four other treatments.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Beckers Hospital Review reports,
    • “Hospitals and health systems are losing money on virtual care across every major payer category even as adoption climbs, according Strata’s latest Performance Trends report.
    • “The national analysis found telehealth encounters rose 79% between January 2019 and January 2026, marking the shift from a pandemic stopgap to a permanent fixture of care delivery. Despite that growth, average total cost margins for telehealth stayed negative in 2025 across commercial, Medicare, Medicaid and self-pay patients. Remote patient monitoring has soared 4,000% over the same time period.
    • “Healthcare organizations are increasingly turning to technology and new care delivery models to address workforce shortages and improve patient access,” said Steve Wasson, Strata’s chief data and intelligence officer. “The challenge is that many of these investments, particularly in virtual care, are occurring at a time when margins remain extremely narrow.”
  • and
    • “Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare has acquired 17 urgent care clinics from Urgent Care Group in North and South Carolina. 
    • “The clinics include locations in Charleston, Columbia, Myrtle Beach and Spartanburg in South Carolina, and Wilmington in North Carolina, according to a June 2 news release. 
    • “The South Carolina clinics are now operating under the first HCA CareNow brand name, becoming the first such clinics in the state, The North Carolina clinics are continuing to operate under the Medac name used by Urgent Care Group.” 
  • Kaufman Hall opines,
    • “Healthcare leaders must confront whether scorecards are improving patient safety or reshaping priorities in ways that may not benefit patients.”
    • Quick take
      • The debate is no longer about whether hospitals should be measured; it’s about whether the industry is measuring what truly matters.
      • Rankings shape reputation, revenue, and strategic priorities, not just public transparency.
      • Health systems are confronting a growing tension between improving patient care and improving publicly visible scores.
      • The number of public rankings is continuously growing.
      • Leaders are questioning whether current scorecards drive meaningful safety improvements or create administrative distraction.
      • The outcome of this debate could redefine how healthcare approaches transparency, accountability, and patient trust in the years ahead.
  • Health Exec relates,
    • “In a new state-by-state analysis of patient spending on healthcare, Utah, Virginia and California are at one end of the “spend the most” vs. “spend the least” rankings. Alaska, Oregon and Maine land at the other. Can you guess which trio’s residents spend the most and which the least?
    • “Time’s up. Alaska takes the undesirable No. 1 pole position: It’s the most expensive state for people who have to pay out of pocket. On average they shell out 10.1% of the median monthly household income to pay for essential medical services and prescriptions. 
    • “Spending the least are residents of Utah, where wallets only take a hit of 5.11%.
    • “The calculations are from WalletHub, which released a report on the topic May 28.” * * *
    • For WalletHub’s full report, click here.
  • Fierce Healthcare informs us,
    • “Community health system WellSpan Health inked a seven-year strategic alliance with Philips to drive advanced imaging technology across its network and co-develop new AI and tech tools.
    • “Philips’ technology will support WellSpan’s full network of 12 hospitals, diagnostic imaging centers and ambulatory surgery centers across Central Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland. A long-term commercial agreement establishes Philips as WellSpan’s preferred vendor across patient monitoring, enterprise informatics and all applicable imaging modalities, including CT, MR, digital X-ray, ultrasound and image-guided therapy.
    • “The commercial agreement includes a structured approach to technology lifecycle management: WellSpan and Philips will align equipment, services, training and upgrade planning under a single, coordinated framework, according to the organizations.
    • “The alliance marks Philips’s first research and innovation collaboration with a U.S. community health system. The health tech giant and WellSpan plan to co-develop net-new products and features that advance care delivery, drawing on Philips’ R&D pipeline, with WellSpan serving as both a proving ground and a co-creator.”
  • Per Fierce Pharma,
    • “With a new patent settlement, Axsome Therapeutics can lower its sword against prospective generics makers taking aim at its narcolepsy med Sunosi.
    • “The central nervous system-focused drugmaker closed the books on years of Sunosi intellectual property litigation by striking a settlement with “the only remaining first-to-file generic applicant with pending product litigation related to Axsome’s product Sunosi,” the drugmaker announced in a June 3 press release.
    • “Through the settlements, five companies will be cleared to market their generic versions of Sunosi starting on September 1, 2040, if Axsome nabs a pediatric exclusivity period for the drug. If not, the knockoffs can launch on March 1, 2040, the company explained. With that, “no other patent litigation relating to Sunosi remains pending.”

Thursday report

David Ermer–Congress, FDA, Federal employment benefits, Generative AI, Medicare, NIH, OPM, SCOTUS, U.S. Healthcare–

Simplicity is a virtue

From Washington, DC,

  • The Wall Street Journal reports,
    • “Republican senators stopped short of using their political leverage to kill President Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, approving a critical immigration-enforcement bill without adding language reining in the controversial program.
    • “Passage of the $70 billion package funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s second term came after a more than 19-hour session of amendment votes and intraparty negotiations. The GOP-backed measure passed 52 to 47 shortly before 5 a.m., with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voting with Democrats against the bill.
    • “The session’s votes allowed GOP senators in competitive election fights this fall—including Susan Collins of Maine, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Jon Husted of Ohio and Ashley Moody of Florida—to register their objections to the fund without derailing a bill that is a priority for Trump and the party.
    • “The House is expected to take up the immigration-enforcement measure next week.”
  • The No Surprises Act’s final independent dispute resolution (IDR) rule was published in the Federal Register today. Federal Hearings and Appeals Services, which a certified IDR entity, offers its summary of the rule with helpful charts!
  • Federal News Network reports
    • The Postal Service, on the verge of running out of cash early next year, is pricing out a wide range of possible reforms that, if passed by Congress, could address the agency’s long-term financial problems.
    • Postmaster General David Steiner told House lawmakers in March that USPS is set to run out of cash in early 2027 and that lawmakers need to act soon to keep the agency running.
    • The agency’s wish-list of possible legislative reforms, outlined in a document titled “Accelerating Progress: Elements of Postal Reform,” includes several longstanding proposals supported by postal watchdogs and unions. The document also considers more controversial options, such as closing post offices and reducing delivery days to save USPS billions of dollars each year.
  • Per a House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform news release,
    • “Subcommittee on Government Operations Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) delivered his opening statement at today’s hearing with the Commissioners of the Postal Regulatory Commission. In his opening remarks, Subcommittee Chairman Sessions highlighted the financial crisis the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is facing and how actions to reform the agency have fallen short of expectations. He also emphasized that Congress and the American people have to decide what they want out of USPS to help resolve procedural and financial issues in the agency.” 
  • The OPM Director Scott Kupor added to his Secrets of OPM blog (available on LinkedIn and Substack) concerning a Presidential Memorandum approving the use of critical position pay to support investment programs related to national security.
  • Tammy Flangan, writing in Govexec, discusses whether a record number of new retirees this year will slow your retirement claim.
    • “New OPM data offers clues about processing times, potential delays and why retiring employees may need a larger financial cushion than expected.” 
  • Per a National Institutes of Health news release,
    • “National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., today announced the selection of Steven Schiff, M.D., Ph.D., as the next director of the Fogarty International Center (FIC) and NIH associate director for international research. Schiff began his role on June 4, 2026. 
    • “A pediatric neurosurgeon and global health researcher, Schiff currently serves as the Harvey and Kate Cushing Professor of Neurosurgery, vice chair for global health in the Department of Neurosurgery, and professor of epidemiology and of electrical and computer engineering at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.” * * *
    • “As director of FIC, Schiff will lead NIH’s global health research efforts by supporting collaborations between U.S. and international investigators, strengthening partnerships among research institutions worldwide, and training future global health scientists. He will oversee the center’s approximately $95 million annual budget, most of which supports research grants and training programs.” 
  • Beckers Health IT lets us know,
    • “The White House is backing a push for AI to take over more of the duties of physicians, The Washington Post reported.
    • “The Trump administration supports an experiment in Utah where AI is writing prescriptions, plans to offer over $50 million in research awards to developers of conversational AI for cardiovascular care, has created an expedited approval process for digital health products like AI chatbots, and is working on a regulatory pathway for independent AI physicians, according to the June 4 story.
    • “People are seeing the difference the AI is bringing,” Amy Gleason, the administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency who is now a healthcare AI advisor at HHS, told the news outlet. “And it’s like the genie is out of the bottle.”
  • and
    • “HHS, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has sought access to detailed patient records held by state health information exchange systems as part of an effort to research a potential link between vaccines and autism, KFF Health News reported June 4.
    • “Federal officials met with leaders of state-run health information exchanges several times over the past year, asking how the medical records they maintain from hospitals and health systems could be used for vaccine research, according to seven people familiar with the meetings.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • STAT News reports,
    • “Leaders at the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday listened to criticisms and recommendations for how to move forward with a speedy drug review program put in place by former FDA commissioner Marty Makary. 
    • “The listening session, held on the FDA’s White Oak Campus, featured 17 speakers representing patient groups, drug companies, and academic organizations. Some had positive feedback, particularly those whose drugs have already been approved through the program. But most asked the agency to pause the program, and then bring it back through normal regulatory procedures that require public feedback.” 
  • Per a corporate news release,
    • “Global pharmaceutical leader Lupin Limited (Lupin) (BSE: 500257) (NSE: LUPIN) (REUTERS: LUPIN.BO) (BLOOMBERG: LPCIN) today announced that the United States Food and Drug Administration (U.S. FDA) has approved its ranibizumab, Ranluspec™ (ranibizumab-hkdz), as an interchangeable biosimilar referencing to Lucentis® (Genentech).”
  • Reuters relates,
    • “The U.S. FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research said on Wednesday it has accepted a letter of intent for ​an artificial intelligence-based drug development tool designed to ‌help predict drug-induced liver injury.
    • ‘Drug-induced liver damage is a major cause of trial failures, and current methods do not reliably ​predict human risk. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said ​the tool could potentially help improve early safety assessments, reduce reliance ⁠on animal testing and support more informed decisions before human trials ​begin.’

From the judicial front,

  • Bloomberg Law reports,
    • “The US Supreme Court raised the bar for branded pharmaceutical companies seeking to sue over a competitor’s generic versions of their drugs that are marketed using what’s called a skinny label.
    • “The justices unanimously concluded that a district court judge was right to dismiss Amarin Pharma Inc.’s infringement suit over claims that Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. was encouraging doctors to prescribe its generic version of Amarin’s Vascepa heart health drug for a still-patented treatment method.
    • “Drugmakers frequently obtain patents not just on chemical compounds they discover for novel drugs, but separately for methods of using such drugs to treat various medical conditions. When some uses are covered by active patents while others aren’t, generics can get government approval of a “skinny label” that carves out the patented uses.
    • “Thursday’s ruling ramps up the evidence that branded drugmakers need in order to sue when they think the generic label in combination with a generic company’s marketing statements or other communications cross a line into actively inducing patent infringement.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • The New York Times reports,
    • “Scientists have made a discovery that may help prevent some people from developing lung cancer, which kills more people worldwide than any other cancer. 
    • “A team of more than 80 researchers working across four continents have identified a set of proteins in the blood that accurately predict lung cancers more than five years before diagnosis. The scientists also found early evidence that an existing anti-inflammatory drug could significantly reduce lung cancer risk in people with elevated concentrations of these proteins, which they linked to inflammation.
    • “More research is needed before a test based on these proteins could be ready for use in patients. And scientists would still need to run a randomized trial to determine whether the drug prevents lung cancers. Still, outside experts said the findings, which were published on Thursday in the journal Cell, offer a promising starting point toward a long-held public health goal.”
  • The Washington Post adds,
    • “The story of GLP-1 drugs keeps getting bigger.
    • “First they transformed the treatment of diabetes. Then they upended the science — and culture — of weight loss. Now a growing body of research is raising another possibility: that these drugs may help protect against cancer.
    • “At this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, more than 40 studies, abstracts, oral presentations and poster presentations examined the relationship between GLP-1-based drugs and cancer. The results were strikingly consistent. Taken together, they suggest that people taking medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro may develop certain cancers at lower rates than comparable patients who are not taking the drugs — and that those already diagnosed may experience a slower decline and better outcomes.
    • “For oncologists, the accumulation of evidence is hard to dismiss. The findings are “super promising,” said Mark Orland, a cancer researcher at the Cleveland Clinic. “We’re really excited to be on the forefront of looking at the effects of these drugs.”
  • Health Day relates,
    • “A simple urine test might help identify children who are likely to have autism earlier than the best assessment tools now available, a new study says.
    • “Autistic children appear to have specific gut microbe profiles that can be used to distinguish them from neurotypical (or typically developing) children, researchers reported May 26 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
    • “A urine test based on these profiles correctly identified 90% of autistic children and did not misidentify any children without autism, researchers found.
    • “What’s really striking about the bacteria is that they make metabolites that are basically altered versions of serotonin and dopamine,” said researcher James Adams, a professor of engineering at the Biodesign Center for Health Through Microbiomes at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe.”
  • and
    • “Mailed fecal immunochemical tests (FITs) can significantly increase colorectal cancer (CRC) screening across racial and ethnic groups, according to a study published in the May/June issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.
    • “Anisha P. Ganguly, M.D., from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues compared the effects of a CRC intervention (mailed FIT for screening-eligible patients plus patient navigation for positive results) across race/ethnicity. The analysis included 3,734 patients at federally qualified health centers.” * * *
    • “This analysis showed that mailed colorectal cancer screening tests have the power to improve screening rates for diverse populations,” Ganguly said in a statement. “This is really important, because we want these innovations in screening to improve outcomes among the hardest to reach populations and move the needle on colorectal cancer disparities.”
  • The American Journal of Managed Care tells us,
    • “Sudden death has long been considered an abrupt and unpredictable event in patients with heart failure
       (HF). But a new post hoc analysis of the FINEARTS-HF randomized clinical trial challenges that assumption, finding that most sudden deaths in patients with HF with mildly reduced ejection fraction (HFmrEF) or preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) are preceded by measurable clinical deterioration in the months before death.”
  • According to Infectious Diseases Advisor,
    • “Maternal SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination during the third trimester reduces risk for infection and related hospitalization in infants through 6 months of age, highlighting the importance of maternal vaccine timing.”
  • STAT News informs us,
    • “Otsuka’s Voyxact slowed the loss of kidney function after one year in patients with a chronic autoimmune kidney disease, but the benefit was less than expected and left room for competing treatments to perform better. 
    • “In a Phase 3 study, patients with IgA nephropathy, or IgAN, who received injections of Voyxact saw their kidneys lose function at an annualized rate of 3 points over one year compared to an annualized function loss of 7.6 points over one year for patients receiving a placebo, the Japanese drugmaker reported Thursday.” * * *
    • “While the relative improvement in kidney function was positive, the result was also less robust than what was seen in an earlier Otsuka study. The data left open the possibility that competing drugs from Vera Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals may be able to show a larger effect on kidney function when their respective studies read out results.” 

From the U.S. healthcare business and artificial intelligence front,

  • Beckers Payers Issues reports,
    • “UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, Aetna’s parent company, are among the top 10 companies on the Fortune 500 this year.
    • “Fortune‘s June 3 list ranks the top 500 U.S. companies by revenue. Nine health payers [which are listed in the article] made the cut, with 2025 revenues ranging from $11.7 billion to $447.6 billion.
    • “UnitedHealth Group held its third-place standing from 2025. Amazon topped the list, ending Walmart’s 13-year tenure in the top spot.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review relates,
    • “Brentwood, Tenn.-based Lifepoint Health has completed its acquisition of eight community hospitals from Louisville, Ky.-based ScionHealth.
    • “The hospitals are spread across six states, according to a June 2 news release. Lifepoint acquired:
      • “Bolivar Medical Center in Cleveland, Miss.
      • “Ennis (Texas) Regional Medical Center
      • “Livingston (Tenn.) Regional Hospital
      • “Logan (W.Va.) Regional Medical Center
      • “Palestine (Texas) Regional Medical Center
      • “Parkview Regional Hospital in Mexia, Texas
      • “St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, Idaho
      • “Watertown (Wis.) Regional Medical Center
    • “Lifepoint originally signed an agreement to acquire the hospitals in March.
    • “ScionHealth said the eight hospitals will keep their current employees, providers and services. The company described the divestiture as part of a broader effort to strengthen its capital structure and focus on core operations.”
  • Healthcare Dive adds,
    • “West Virginia University Health System has solidified the next phase in its plan to acquire Greensburg, Pennsylvania-based nonprofit Independence Health System, announcing this week the two parties had signed a definitive agreement to combine.
    • “As part of the deal, which was announced last year, WVU Health System will invest $800 million into Independence’s five hospitals in order to install a new electronic health record and upgrade the facilities.
    • “The health systems now expect the acquisition will close in September or October, pending regulatory approval.”
  • Fierce Healthcare tells us,
    • “Due to advances in cancer treatment and early detection, the population of cancer survivors continues to grow, reaching more than 18 million individuals in the U.S. By 2035, that number is projected to exceed 22 million.
    • “But many cancer survivors have ongoing medical and mental health needs after cancer treatment ends. Faced with long-term side effects, behavioral health challenges and hormone therapies, many survivors are left to manage these healthcare challenges on their own.
    • “Value-based cancer care navigation company Thyme Care has expanded its cancer survivorship program, called Next Chapter Care, to provide a personalized, longitudinal approach to survivorship support. That program provides coordinated oncology support beyond active treatment for the more than 15,000 Thyme Care members who have completed cancer treatment.
    • “Rather than treating survivorship as a disconnected phase of care, the program extends the existing relationship Thyme Care already has with members across diagnosis, treatment and recovery, according to the company.”
  • and
    • “Artificial intelligence-powered payer intelligence startup Anomaly Insights launched a new tool aimed at providing managed care executives with evidence to bring to payer negotiations. 
    • “Anomaly Insights seeks to take on what Anomaly CEO Mike Desjadon told Fierce Healthcare is an “adversarial payment system” in the U.S. healthcare industry. He added there is also a “fundamental asymmetry” in data between insurance companies and health systems. 
    • “It’s that asymmetry that allows an insurance company to basically make the health care system chase its tail with denials and all the things that they do with data,” Desjadon said. 
    • “Artificial intelligence-powered payer intelligence startup Anomaly Insights launched a new tool aimed at providing managed care executives with evidence to bring to payer negotiations. 
    • “Anomaly Insights seeks to take on what Anomaly CEO Mike Desjadon told Fierce Healthcare is an “adversarial payment system” in the U.S. healthcare industry. He added there is also a “fundamental asymmetry” in data between insurance companies and health systems. 
    • “It’s that asymmetry that allows an insurance company to basically make the health care system chase its tail with denials and all the things that they do with data,” Desjadon said. “
  • Beckers Hospital Review points out,
    • “Active drug shortages in the U.S. rose for the second consecutive quarter in 2026, reaching 223 in the first quarter, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists — and the FDA’s database continues to reflect new discontinuations weekly. The database is updated daily to reflect manufacturing recoveries, regulatory actions and how shortages are classified — not solely day-to-day availability at the hospital level.”
    • The article also lists eight recent additions to the shortage list.

Midweek Update

David Ermer–Congress, FDA, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, No Surprises Act, Obesity, OPM, U.S. Healthcare–

Simplicity is a virtue.

“Simplicity is not about doing less; it’s about focusing on what matters most. The future of performance management is about creating value with clarity & ease.”

From Washington, DC,

  • BioPharma Dive reports,
    • “A bipartisan House bill proposed Tuesday would require government screening of U.S. investments in Chinese biotechnology in the wake of two pharmaceutical deals potentially worth more than $10 billion each.
    • “Reps. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., chairman of the Select Committee on China, and Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., are sponsoring the bill, dubbed the Biotech Investment National Security Act. It would amend the COINS legislation passed last year to restrict investment in certain sensitive technologies, adding biotechnology to the list.
    • “Under the new bill, licensing deals, joint ventures and equity investments in China could be subject to both Treasury and Defense Department reviews. Moolenaar and Dingell focused on licensing deals involving technology and intellectual property and excluded agricultural biotechnology, industrial fermentation and basic academic research.”
  • Federal News Network relates
    • “Close to 8,000 career federal employees will be moved into a new employment category with limited job protections, after the Trump administration took the final step to make Schedule Policy/Career a reality.
    • ‘An executive order President Donald Trump signed Wednesday afternoon formalizes the long-expected federal employment classification and eliminates civil service protections for thousands of senior-level positions across government. The move is meant to boost workforce accountability, but has also drawn sharp criticism from federal unions, employee organizations and other stakeholders.
    • “Trump administration officials said the creation of Schedule Policy/Career aims to improve employee accountability and ensure the federal workforce is carrying out the president’s policy agenda. Officials also said it’s currently too difficult to remove federal employees for poor performance.
    • “It’s also about a restoration, in our mind, of the democratic process,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told reporters during a press call Wednesday. “What Schedule Policy/Career does is really nothing new. This is exactly the way the system worked for a very long time … In order to affect the policy priorities of the administration, we need to have people willing to and capable of carrying out those directives.” * * *
    • “The targeted 8,000 career federal positions for the new classification is far lower than OPM’s initial estimate that Schedule Policy/Career would cover about 50,000 positions. Some earlier estimates had also suggested as many as 200,000 positions could be converted.”
  • Govexec tells us,
    • “With one protest withdrawn and a second one denied, the Office of Personnel Management is now free to move forward with its plan to award a 10-year contract to modernize the government’s human resource systems.
    • “OPM released the final solicitation in October for the Federal HR 2.0 contract to modernize systems that cover 2 million employees across the government. The agency wants a single integrated platform that will be the infrastructure for a more data-driven federal HR ecosystem, according to solicitation documents.
    • “Bidders had to submit proposals by Oct. 31 and OPM followed a two-step process for evaluation. After step one, IBM Corp. and then Economic Systems Inc. filed their protests.
    • “IBM filed its protest on Feb. 25 but withdrew without explanation on April 3. Meanwhile, Economic Systems filed a protest on March 2. On Monday, the Government Accountability Office posted on its public docket that it had denied Economic Systems protest.
    • “OPM could not make an award while the protests were active, but it could continue to evaluate proposals. Now it can pick a winner with the protests out of the way.
    • ‘While no dollar value has been disclosed, the undertaking is massive.”
  • Kevin Moss, writing in Federal News Network, encourages federal employees to take a look at joining FEHB and PSHB high deductible plans that allow them to contribute to triple tax deductible health savings accounts.

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • U.S. News and World Report reports,
    • “Acting U.S. FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas met ⁠with ⁠rare disease groups on Wednesday, according to groups ⁠attending and a government official, as the new chief seeks to repair relations with a sector disappointed ​by his predecessor.
    • “Representatives for rare disease organizations including Friends of Cancer Research and the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics are pushing Diamantas for greater certainty and support ‌for treatments for small patient populations, the ‌groups said.
    • “The acting chief is seeking to steady operations and mend fences following Commissioner Marty Makary’s resignation last month. Makary had clashed with the White ⁠House over issues including ⁠vaping products.
    • “Jeff Allen, CEO of Friends of Cancer Research, in a phone interview with Reuters ​following the meeting, described it as a “breath of fresh air.”
  • MedTech Dive relates,
    • “Edwards Lifesciences said it has secured FDA approval for the first surgical valve replacement designed for patients with tricuspid valve disease.
    • “The approval introduces a surgical option for a long-underserved area of structural heart care, extending Edwards’ Resilia tissue technology to the tricuspid position, a spokesperson told MedTech Dive in an email. 
    • “Called Triformis Resilia, the valve has a flattened sewing ring shape that mirrors the native tricuspid valve’s annulus anatomy.”

From the judicial front,

  • STAT News reports,
    • ‘A fourth major health insurer is suing HaloMD over its use of the No Surprises Act’s arbitration process, arguing that the middleman deceived arbitrators by sending them a “sham letter” and misleading price data. 
    • “Highmark Health, a Pennsylvania-based Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee with over 7 million members, claims in a complaint filed June 1 in U.S. District Court in Western Pennsylvania that HaloMD and one of its clients, a neuromonitoring provider called Bromedicon, submitted more than 450 ineligible disputes with the company and won more than $3.9 million. Like the three Blue Cross plans before it, Highmark wants those awards tossed and its money returned.” * * *
    • “Other insurers have so far gotten chilly receptions to their suits. Judges in California and Texas have dismissed similar lawsuits against HaloMD and its provider clients, finding their allegations — that the company deliberately submitted ineligible disputes and won huge payouts anyway — didn’t warrant the court’s review. The rulings don’t bode well for Highmark or outstanding cases in Georgia and Ohio.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • The Wall Street Journal reports,
    • “Eating a diet high in ultraprocessed foods is associated with an increased risk of dementia, according to new research, adding to the growing list of health problems linked to foods such as packaged cookies, hot dogs and chips.
    • “In a study published Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health, the group of people who reported eating the highest amount of ultraprocessed foods had a 58% higher risk of later developing dementia and a 46% increased risk of developing cognitive impairment than those who said they ate the least.” * * *
    • “Nutrition researchers generally define ultraprocessed foods as items containing ingredients that wouldn’t generally be found in a home kitchen, such as emulsifiers—used to improve the texture of food—and high-fructose corn syrup. 
    • “The new study found that diets high in minimally processed foods, such as fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and unprocessed meats, were linked to a decreased risk of dementia and cognitive impairment. People who ate the most minimally processed foods had a 41% lower risk of dementia compared with those who ate the least.”
  • and
    • “New research suggests anesthesia may be closer to being in a coma than previously thought, not just a deep sleep.
    • “Researchers compared brain-wave data from anesthetized patients with those awake, asleep or in a coma.
    • “Understanding these brain patterns could help redesign anesthesia to resemble natural sleep, reducing postoperative issues, experts say.”
  • MedPage Today relates,
    • “Deaths of despair — fatalities from drugs, alcohol, and suicide — declined by 16% in 2024, according to a report from Trust for America’s Health.
  • and
    • “Weight loss is known to reduce the need for joint replacement surgery in overweight or obese people with knee osteoarthritis (OA), and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists are an established way to lose weight.
    • “This study of health records demonstrated that use of GLP-1 drugs was associated with reduced arthroplasty rates, with longer exposure leading to correspondingly lower rates.
    • “Reasons for initiating GLP-1 drug therapy were not known, however, and weight loss was not tracked over time, so the mechanisms underlying the observed associations remain unknown.”
  • Gastroenterology Advisor tells us,
    • “A baseline colonoscopy among individuals aged 40 to 49 years is associated with a significantly reduced risk for colorectal cancer (CRC), especially for men aged 45 to 49 years, according to study results published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.” * * *
    • “These findings provide large-scale observational evidence that the risk-reducing association of an early baseline evaluation becomes increasingly apparent over several years of follow-up,” the study authors stated.”
  • Health Day notes,
    • “Scientists may be one step closer to staging Alzheimer’s disease with a simple blood test.
    • “The test could offer a cheaper, less invasive alternative to brain scans and spinal taps now used to diagnose and determine the extent of disease.
    • “Researchers developed a model that uses just two forms of tau protein in the blood to track Alzheimer’s progression. They tried it on more than 1,000 patients, including people who were cognitively unimpaired, patients with mild cognitive impairment, patients with Alzheimer’s dementia and people with other neurodegenerative diseases.
    • “The result: Staging from the blood model closely matched the accuracy of PET brain scans.”
  • and
    • “Population-based screening for early-stage type 1 diabetes identifies most children who progress to clinical type 1 diabetes, with additional cases detected with repeat screening, according to a study published online May 21 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.”

From the U.S. healthcare business and artificial intelligence front,

  • Beckers Payer Issues reports,
    • “Cigna will stop covering GLP-1s for weight loss through its own employee health plan July 1, the company confirmed to Becker’s.
    • “We regularly review our health benefits to ensure they remain sustainable, accessible and aligned with the unique needs of our workforce. As availability has increased and new options have emerged, we’ve made the decision to end our plan’s coverage for GLP-1s for weight loss,” a company spokesperson said. “We remain committed to supporting our employees’ health through a range of weight-management programs and resources.”
    • “The change will not apply to those using GLP-1s for diabetes, the spokesperson said. It also will not apply to Cigna plans beyond its own, a spokesperson confirmed to Reuters, which first reported the development June 2. GLP-1 users for weight loss have until June 30 to obtain refills. 
    • ‘An internal document reviewed by Reuters said employees can pay for these drugs with cash directly through manufacturer websites or TrumpRx. However, that spending would not count toward deductibles. Cigna will continue to cover generic weight-loss drugs that predate GLP-1s, such as phentermine, diethylpropion, benzphetamine and phendimetrazine, according to Reuters.
    • “Cigna joins a wave of healthcare employers cutting back GLP-1 access for their workers as cost pressures mount.”
  • The Wall Street Journal provides “Five Takeaways From the WSJ’s Autism Billing-Abuse Investigation — Insurers’ fraud warnings, a nearly $1 million surprise therapy bill and the back story of a visit to the Brooklyn-based provider the Perfect Child.”
  • MedTech Dive relates,
    • “Medtronic ended its fiscal year on a high note, growing revenue by nearly double digits in its fiscal fourth quarter.
    • “The medtech company brought in $9.8 billion of revenue in the quarter, representing year-over-year growth of nearly 10%. The performance was better than expected, J.P. Morgan analyst Robbie Marcus said in a note to investors.
    • CEO Geoff Martha said Medtronic delivered its strongest annual top-line growth in 10 years.
    • “Through a dynamic macro environment, we have executed, and we’ve executed with discipline to deliver an excellent fiscal ’26 that will continue into fiscal ’27,” Martha told investors Wednesday morning.
    • “The performance was driven by solid sales for its cardiovascular unit and strong growth for businesses within the segment.”
  • The Wall Street Journal inform us,
    • “Eli Lilly LLY signed a collaboration and licensing agreement worth up to $1.9 billion with Ascidian Therapeutics to research and develop kidney-disease treatments.
    • “Ascidian, a Boston-based biotechnology company, said Wednesday it granted Eli Lilly exclusive, target-specific rights to its RNA-exon-editing technology for undisclosed kidney-disease targets.
    • “The RNA-exon editors are capable of altering parts of genetic code to repair genetic instructions that cause disease.
    • “Ascidian said it will lead discovery and certain preclinical activities, while Eli Lilly will be responsible for other preclinical work, clinical development, manufacturing and commercialization.
    • “Ascidian is eligible to receive up to $1.9 billion, including an upfront payment, development and commercial milestone payments, and tiered royalties on commercial sales worldwide, it said.”
  • Fierce Healthcare tells us,
    • “Mayo Clinic plans to develop and deploy a frontier AI model specifically designed for healthcare in collaboration with Microsoft. 
    • “The strategic collaboration combines Mayo Clinic’s global healthcare expertise, de-identified clinical health data and longitudinal insights with Microsoft’s advanced AI, cloud engineering and tech capabilities, the companies announced Tuesday.
    • “The two organizations say they are developing a frontier AI model “capable of supporting the broadest scope of clinical reasoning and healthcare use cases,” according to a press release.
    • “The frontier AI model is designed to synthesize diverse clinical data to support earlier diagnoses, more personalized treatment decisions and better patient outcomes. The AI collaboration will make Mayo Clinic’s medical expertise and integrated model of care available to more people when and where they need it, the two organizations said.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review adds,
    • “Washington, D.C.-based Children’s National Hospital has introduced a pediatric AI innovation hub to translate the technology from concept to bedside use.
    • “The partnership with Blacksburg-based Virginia Tech will bring together pediatric clinicians, biomedical researchers and AI specialists to create advancements for what has been an underserved community thus far in the technology’s evolution.
    • “Children have historically been underrepresented in AI research despite having fundamentally different physiology, disease patterns and developmental needs,” said Marius George Linguraru, director of AI research at Children’s National, in a June 2 news release. “We have an opportunity to build pediatric AI the right way from the beginning by developing and validating these technologies specifically for children and within pediatric clinical settings.”
  • Fierce Pharma points out,
    • “Pharma solutions firm Cencora and Gilead Sciences have expanded their longstanding partnership, cutting a deal in which the distribution giant will support access to Gilead’s CAR-T cancer therapies Yescarta and Tecartus.
    • “The collaboration is designed to facilitate more efficient access to the blood cancer therapies, which were developed by Gilead’s CAR-T subsidiary Kite Pharma. 
    • “Under the agreement, Cencora will leverage its substantial distribution infrastructure to bolster cell therapy availability at an “increasing number” of authorized U.S. treatment centers, including health systems and community oncology practices, according to a June 2 release.” 
  • HR Dive lets us know,
    • “Workers over age 55 make up almost a quarter of the workforce (23.2%), according to a report from MyPerfectResume. Moreover, according to researchers, the growth of the older workforce outpaces the general workforce. Likewise, the share of workers over age 65 increased by more than 40%, according to the report.”

Cybersecurity Saturday

David Ermer–Congress, Cybersecurity, Generative AI–

From the War with Iran front

  • SC Media reports,
    • The Iran state-sponsored threat group Nimbus Manticore conducted attacks during the U.S.-Israel military campaign Operation Epic Fury targeting the U.S. aviation industry and others for deployment of a new AI-assisted backdoor called “MiniFast,” Check Point Research reported Friday [May 22].
    • The attacks, seen throughout the 2026 Iran war in March, followed previous campaigns throughout February using an older backdoor called MiniJunk. Both waves of attacks utilized career-themed phishing lures for initial access and AppDomain hijacking techniques to execute malicious payloads. * * *
    • Check Point said Nimbus Manticore has shifted tactics in its most recent attacks, seen after the Iran war ceasefire in April, using search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning to impersonate the software Oracle SQL Developer and spread MiniFast.
    • “MiniFast, the successor of MiniJunk, enables extensive control of the victim’s machine through API-based communications with the attacker’s command-and-control (C2) server. As in previous attacks, Nimbus Manticore used career-themed phishing lures to spread MiniFast during Operation Epic Fury, specifically impersonating a U.S. domestic airline.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive adds,
    • “Iranian government-linked hackers sabotaged the computer infrastructure of Los Angeles’s transit system by using access to a virtual machine to delete critical operating-system data, the Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security said in a report published on Tuesday.
    • “The same threat actor also conducted data-wiping attacks on the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, the connected-vehicle technology firm Agnik and a Saudi Arabian construction company that handles critical infrastructure projects, according to the report.
    • “Gambit dismissed the hackers’ claims of being a new pro-Iranian hacktivist gang, instead attributing their operations to Black Shadow, a group that the Israeli government and private security firms have linked to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.”

From the Project Glasswing front,

  • Bleeping Computer reports,
    • “Anthropic has confirmed that it plans to bring Mythos-class models to the general public after delaying the rollout due to security risks to public and private software.” * * *
    • In a blog post, Anthropic confirmed that it plans to release Mythos-class models to the public in the coming weeks, but it has not committed to a specific timeframe.
    • “We’re making swift progress on developing these safeguards and expect to be able to bring Mythos-class models to all our customers in the coming weeks,” Anthropic said in a blog post.
    • “Anthropic says it is already allowing a small number of organizations to use Claude Mythos preview for cybersecurity work, but it is unclear if the same model will be rolled out to the public.
    • “According to the company, the Mythos model shows major improvements in code reasoning and autonomy, far above Claude’s current flagship model, Opus 4.8.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

  • Beckers Health IT reports,
    • “House Republican leaders are calling on FBI Director Kash Patel to act aggressively to stop cybercriminal groups targeting the healthcare industry.
    • “In a May 28 letter to Mr. Patel, the lawmakers pointed to the sharp increase in healthcare ransomware attacks and data breaches over the past several years that jeopardize patient safety and cost hospitals and health systems millions of dollars.
    • “We strongly encourage continued collaboration between the FBI and healthcare stakeholders, including through public-private partnerships, streamlined reporting mechanisms, and clear guidance that enables hospitals — large and small — to participate effectively in information-sharing initiatives without undue burden,” the legislators wrote.”
  • Cyberscoop relates,
    • “House subcommittee will hold an open hearing next week on how frontier artificial intelligence models are shaping the cybersecurity landscape, for good and for ill.
    • “The June 4 hearing will be the second the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection has held that was focused at least in part on the subject, following a similar hearing held in December. But unlike at that joint subcommittee hearing, where members also examined other emerging technologies, AI takes center stage next week. * * *
    • “The witnesses will be Sandra Joyce, vice president of Google Threat Intelligence; Chris Meserole, executive director of the Frontier Model Forum; Jack Cable, a former top official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and now chief executive officer and co-founder of Corridor Security; and Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”
  • and
    • “The White House has updated rules for federal agencies to keep logs of significant cyber activities in their networks, touting it as a measure to cut back on red tape and focus on how cybersecurity risks have evolved.
    • “The Office of Management and Budget memorandum, released Friday, replaces a 2021 memo signed by then-President Joe Biden. It continues revisions that President Donald Trump has made to federal cybersecurity guidance under his predecessor.
    • “The new memo, M-26-14, nods at the intentions of the earlier memo, M-21-31, saying that “Implementation of that memorandum improved foundational capabilities across agencies” to establish standards for logging and improve agencies’ record-keeping for the purposes of detecting and responding to cyberattacks.” * * *
    • “There have been calls for the idea of updating the 2021 memo, and one observer praised the new version to CyberScoop. Another analyst, however, questioned how much harm the Trump administration might do by rescinding the earlier memo before having all of the new memo’s directives in place.
    • “One directive is for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop a “logging reference architecture” within 90 days that prioritizes the objectives of conducting continuous event monitoring and enabling investigations of forensic analysis after a known or suspected compromise.
    • “Agencies would have another 90 days to submit a logging plan that adheres to those principles. The memo also establishes a new model for measuring agency progress in implementation. Multiple government watchdogs have concluded that agencies weren’t meeting the prior memo’s benchmarks.”
  • Federal News Network adds,
    • “Acting Federal Chief Information Security Officer Mike Duffy wrote on LinkedIn that the new policy “focuses agencies on what matters most: continuous visibility, rapid detection, effective threat hunting and actionable response capabilities.”
    • “And given the recent discovery by Claude’s Mythos of thousands of zero day vulnerabilities in systems that were previously known or not addressed, agencies and industry are being forced to figure out how best to strengthen their partnership against these AI-fueled attacks.
    • “Nick Andersen, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said he has deep concerns specifically about one type of technology when it comes to cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
    • “The open source community is one that I’m particularly worried about when we start to think about the rapid escalation of vulnerability discovery. But it is going to result in us having to make some really, really hard decisions on the level of investment that’s going to be required,” Andersen said on May 21 at the Cyber Innovation Summit sponsored by the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.”
  • Cyberscoop cautions,
    • “A Department of Commerce inspector general report released Thursday [May 28] found that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has mismanaged a critical cybersecurity vulnerability database through poor planning, inefficient operations, duplicate federal programs, and failure to communicate with users.
    • “The National Vulnerability Database, maintained by NIST since 2005, collects information about computer security flaws and adds details like severity ratings and affected products. This information helps cybersecurity professionals across government and the private sector decide which security problems to fix first. In February 2024, the database’s enrichment contract lapsed, creating a backlog of unprocessed security flaws that has only grown worse.
    • “The report identified the lack of strategic planning as a core problem. NIST leaders admitted they had no long-term plan for clearing the backlog, even as it grew from about 13,000 unprocessed security flaws in June 2024 to over 27,000 by the end of 2025.
  • The American Hospital Association lets us know,
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency May 26 announced a revised schedule for its series of virtual town hall meetings for public input on proposed rulemaking for the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022. The meetings will now begin June 15. They were originally scheduled for March and April but were not held due to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. CISA seeks input to finalize a proposed rule originally issued in March 2024. The proposed rule would require critical infrastructure organizations, including hospitals and health systems, to report certain cyber incidents to CISA within 72 hours and ransom payments within 24 hours, among other mandates. The AHA commented on the rule, calling certain proposed requirements redundant to those from other federal agencies and saying that they may add unnecessary burden to hospitals working to ensure access to needed services during cybersecurity incident response.”
  • CISA notes,
    • “The revised [town hall meeting] schedule is available in the Federal Register. Interested stakeholders may register for the town hall meetings at www.cisa.gov/circia. Any changes or updates to the town halls will be available on www.cisa.gov/circia“
  • Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday [May 28] warned that hackers targeted software development pipelines in recent weeks and urged security teams to check for potential compromise of their environments. 
    • “CISA referenced two recent campaigns, including the “Megalodon” supply chain attack and a GitHub compromise through a malicious Nx Console Visual Studio Code extension.” * * *
    • “CISA is urging security teams to monitor and conduct audits on their workflow files and activity from contributors. Attention should be paid to suspicious pull requests or direct commits, specifically any coming from an automated account. 
    • “Security teams should revert any unauthorized changes, CISA advised, and check for anything that came in after May 18. 
    • ‘If a compromise is found in connection with a previously compromised Nx Console or GitHub account, CISA suggests the following:
      • “Undertake a forensics review of continuous integration/continuous delivery logs, impacted developer machines and cloud audit trails. 
      • “Rotate or revoke secrets, including credentials, tokens and secrets related to CI/CD pipelines.”
  • The Wall Street Journal informs us,
    • “The FBI’s latest report on internet crime complaints shows cybercriminals are using AI, causing $893 million in losses.
    • “Cryptocurrency investment fraud was the largest source of financial losses, totaling $7.2 billion last year.
    • “Government-impersonation scams increased to over 32,000 complaints last year, aided by AI for sophistication.”
  • Bleeping Computer points out,
    • “A North Carolina man was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for selling the personal information of over 7 million elderly Americans to Jamaican scammers.
    • “57-year-old Troy Murray (who used the Steve Dixon pseudonym) pleaded guilty in January 2026 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced Thursday to 121 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $5,2 million.
    • ‘Prosecutors said that Murray’s alias was so widely known among Jamaican scammers that it was referenced in a 2022 song lyric by a Jamaican musical artist.
  • and
    • A Romanian national was sentenced this week to 56 months in federal prison for breaking into an Oregon state government computer network and fr cyberattacks targeting dozens of other U.S. victims.
    • 46-year-old Catalin Dragomir (who used the online handle “inthematrixl”) of Constanta, Romania, pleaded guilty on February 19 to one count of aggravated identity theft and one count of obtaining information from a protected computer.
    • The charges carried a maximum of five years in prison for the computer intrusion count, followed by a mandatory consecutive two-year term for the identity theft count, a fine of $250,000, and three years’ supervised release. The court also ordered Dragomir to forfeit approximately 23 Monero (XMR), a cryptocurrency, valued at roughly $8,500.

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

  • Bleeping Computer reports,
    • “The ShinyHunters extortion gang stole personal information from 4.9 million accounts after hacking the U.S. telecom giant Charter Communications in early April, according to data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
      “Charter has over 92,000 employees and provides internet, mobile, video, and voice services to more than 32 million customers and over 57 million homes in 41 states across the U.S. through its Spectrum brand.
      “The company confirmed the breach earlier this week, saying that the attackers did not steal sensitive personal customer information and that it had alerted authorities about the incident.”
    • * * * “After the company refused to pay the ransom demanded by ShinyHunters to have the stolen data returned and destroyed, the cybercrime group leaked the documents stolen from Charter’s Salesforce instance on their dark web leak site.
    • “Have I Been Pwned analyzed the leaked data and confirmed that the incident affected 4.9 million accounts, whose names, email addresses, job titles, phone numbers, and physical addresses were stolen.
    • “The group later published the data, which exposed 4.9M unique email addresses along with names, phone numbers and physical addresses,” Have I Been Pwned said. “A subset of approximately 85k records originating from an internal employee directory also included job titles.”
    • “The FBI has recently advised ShinyHunters’ victims not to give in to the gang’s ransom demands, after previously warning that doing so cannot guarantee that threat actors won’t attempt to sell the stolen data to other cybercriminals or extort them again.
  • and
    • “Threat actors are abusing ChatGPT’s content-sharing feature to display fake OpenAI outage pages that direct users to download malware disguised as the ChatGPT desktop application.
    • “The “LLMShare” campaign, discovered by Push Security, uses Google ads to direct users searching for ChatGPT to a malicious shared ChatGPT page hosted on chatgpt.com, allowing the attack to be delivered through a legitimate OpenAI domain.
    • “Users who click the advertisement are taken to a legitimate ChatGPT shared page, but instead of seeing a chat conversation, they are presented with a rendered outage notice claiming the web version is unavailable and that they should download the desktop application instead.”
  • Security Week relates,
    • “The infamous extortion gang Silent Ransom Group (SRG) has been impersonating IT support in a fresh campaign targeting law firms, the FBI warns.
    • “Active since at least 2022, SRG has been targeting law firms in the US since at least 2023, mainly through callback phishing emails and social engineering calls, claiming to aid victims in canceling subscription fees.
    • “In a May 2025 alert, the FBI warned of SRG’s phishing emails containing links to remote access software that allowed the attackers to quickly exfiltrate data from the victims’ systems.
    • “In attacks observed this year, the threat actor has updated its tactics, now posing as an employee from the victim’s IT department.” * * *
    • “To prevent SRG attacks, organizations are advised to verify the credentials of all individuals with access to company assets, limit access to sensitive data, train employees to identify phishing attempts, and establish clear policies for IT support communication and authentication.
    • “Backing up all company data, implementing phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA), blocking access to commonly exploited ports, and disabling remote access and permissions for external drive installation should also prevent intrusions and the loss of sensitive and confidential data.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
    • “Nearly all executives are confident their employees are using AI responsibly, but shadow AI is creeping its way into organizations, an Okta survey released Wednesday found. More than half of employeesreported they’re using personal AI tools without approval, the security platform provider learned in surveying nearly 300 tech executives and 500 knowledge workers along with market research firm Apprize360.
    • “Workers reported using unapproved AI tools for productivity reasons, saying they allow the tools access to internal messages, HR-related information and confidential company documents. The practice is heightening security risks, as 58% of executives said their organization had an AI-related security incident or a close call last year, according to the report. 
    • “Lack of clarity in AI usage policies or banning personal AI tools can actually increase shadow AI use, said Harish Peri, Okta’s SVP and GM for AI security, in an email. “By taking a more collaborative approach with employees, leaders can offer sanctioned, enterprise-grade alternatives to the unapproved tools that teams are using.”

From the ransomware front,

  • Industrial Cyber reports,
    • “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disclosed that about 25 ransomware groups used a criminal VPN service known as ‘First VPN Service’ to conduct network intrusions, scanning operations, botnets, denial-of-service attacks, and scams. The service has been active since around 2014 across 32 exit nodes in 27 countries. It affects organizations by enabling ransomware groups and other cybercriminal actors to conduct network intrusions, reconnaissance, credential abuse, denial-of-service attacks, and broader malicious operations.
    • “At least 25 ransomware groups, such as Avaddon Ransomware, have used First VPN Service infrastructure to perform network reconnaissance and intrusions,” the FBI wrotein a recent FLASH advisory. “First VPN Service IP addresses have been used for scanning activity, botnets, denial of service attacks, scams, and hacking. First VPN Service was almost exclusively advertised in known criminal dark web forums such as Exploit[.]in and XSS[.]is, two of the most prominent Russian-language online forums which provide marketplaces for cyber criminals to buy and sell unauthorized access to computer systems, stolen personal identifying information, hacking tools, and contraband. This reporting applies solely to the First VPN Service and does not extend to other VPN providers with similar naming.” 
    • “The revelation came alongside a coordinated international takedown of the service, led by French and Dutch cybercrime units with support from Ukraine, the U.K., Switzerland, and Luxembourg. It follows from the findings that the VPN was marketed almost exclusively on prominent Russian-language dark web forums used by cybercriminals to trade stolen data, hacking tools, and unauthorized access to systems.”
  • Morphisec tells us “How AI is Changing Ransomware — and Why It’s Faster, Smarter, and Harder to Detect.” 
    • “AI-driven ransomware is still in its early stages, but the direction is clear. Threats are becoming:   
      • “faster  
      • “more adaptive
      • “more autonomous  
      • “harder to observe  
      • “increasingly resistant to detection    
    • “Organizations that continue relying solely on reactive security models will face growing exposure as attack timelines shrink, and visibility gaps expand. The future of cybersecurity will not be defined by who can detect threats fastest. It will be defined by who can prevent them from executing at all.”   
  • Tech Radar adds,
    • “There is a glaring misconception at the heart of cybersecurity that cyber-attacks are targeted at specific organizations or sectors. But while certain sectors do receive more than their fair share of attacks, this isn’t due to deliberate targeting; like any business, it’s driven by money.
    • “Threat groups are largely driven by financial gain, with actors looking to get the most ‘bang for their buck’. Targeting vulnerabilities that don’t just give them access to one organization, but multiple, to grow their potential revenue opportunities.
    • “And at the moment, organizations are leaving far too many of these vulnerabilities open for exploitation.”

Cybersecurity business and defenses front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “IBM will spend $5 billion to help find and fix vulnerabilities in open-source software packages used throughout the business world, the company announced on Thursday [May 28].
    • “Through Project Lightwell, IBM will create “a trusted enterprise clearinghouse combined with a global force of engineers to identify and fix vulnerabilities at scale,” using AI to validate and test the patches before deployment, the company said. Businesses will be able to subscribe to the patching program for automated deployment of fixes that integrates with their existing life cycle management processes.
    • “Open source is the backbone of today’s digital economy and the foundation of modern AI, and we are at an inflection point in how it is built, secured, and scaled,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a statement. “This is about strengthening trust in the systems that power business, government, and society.”
  • Security Week relates,
    • “Google Cloud this week announced an always-on autonomous platform designed to protect enterprises from the rising wave of AI-powered cyberattacks.
    • “The new Google AI Threat Defense cybersecurity solution leverages AI to identify machine-powered threats faster and stop them before they can do harm.
    • “According to Google, the platform continuously prioritizes critical real-world risks and can help organizations implement defenses that predict attack paths and proactively deploy remediation.
    • “Google AI Threat Defense combines Mandiant’s frontline and incident response experience with Wiz’s cloud security platform (recently acquired by Google) and Gemini’s reasoning and code remediation capabilities powered by Gemini and CodeMender.
    • “By connecting real-world exposure directly to autonomously creating and prioritizing patching, AI Threat Defense helps organizations actively predict attack paths, prioritize the most significant threats, and deploy verified fixes faster than adversaries can exploit them,” Google says.”
  • and
    • “Anthropic has announced two new security features for its Claude AI: a self-hosted sandbox and a new security guidance plugin.
    • “The sandbox, currently in public beta, was announced at Anthorpic’s Code w/ Claude event in London this week.
    • “According to the company, Claude Managed Agents can now operate in a user-controlled sandbox connected to the user’s private MPC servers. 
    • “Tool execution moves to an environment you configure—your own infrastructure or a managed provider like Cloudflare, Daytona, Modal, or Vercel—while the agent loop that handles orchestration, context management, and error recovery stays on Anthropic’s infrastructure,” Anthropic explained. 
    • “It added, “Your network policies, audit logging, and security tooling apply, files and repositories don’t leave your perimeter, and you control compute sizing and the runtime image for compute-heavy work.”
    • “Separately, the company unveiled a security guidance plugin for Claude Code, designed to help developers detect and fix vulnerabilities as they write code.”
  • Cyberscoop informs us,
    • “CrowdStrike has dismantled the Glassworm botnet in an operation aided by Google and Shadowserver, stripping the operators’ access to infrastructure that helped threat actors infect hundreds of pieces of open-source software with malware since early 2025, the company said Tuesday [May 26]. 
    • “The coordinated effort involved the simultaneous takedown of four attacker-controlled servers that were designed to obscure the botnet’s operations and remain resilient against disruptions.
    • “CrowdStrike and partners took down infrastructure, severed access to the botnet’s most critical services, impeded operation momentum and slowed the attackers’ ability to scale, Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.”
  • and
    • “Security researchers chained together five separate weaknesses in the popular workflow automation service Zapier that, if first discovered by a malicious actor, could have granted access to millions of user accounts and the systems those accounts connect to.
    • :The flaws, disclosed by security firm Token Security, did not require malware or insider access. The only prerequisite, according to the company’s report, was a free Zapier account. From there, researchers chained together weaknesses that, if taken individually, would have looked routine, but together opened a path to one of the most widely used services of the modern internet.
    • “Zapier’s software can be configured to move data between email, customer-relationship tools, payment processors, calendars, code repositories and thousands of other applications. Zapier says it supports more than 8,000 third-party integrations and has millions of users, which means breaking into Zapier could escalate into a wide-ranging supply-chain attack.” * * *
    • “The episode lands at a moment when automation platforms and artificial-intelligence tools are increasingly being granted the standing authority to act on behalf of users across dozens of services at once. Token Security’s researchers argued that the weaknesses they found were not unique to Zapier. Each link in the chain, they said, was a well-documented kind of mistake. The vulnerability was the chain itself, and the same pattern, they warned, almost certainly exists at other companies that have not yet looked.
    • “Zapier says the issues have been fixed and no further action is required. But the researchers suggested organizations with heightened sensitivity review their automation logs for anything they did not create, and consider reauthorizing Zapier connections to particularly sensitive systems.
    • “You can read the full research report on Token Security’s website.” 
  • Tech Target points out
    • “The unified platform versus best-of-breed tools debate continues as security teams struggle with integration challenges, alert fatigue and limited resources. Does buying software from individual vendors still make sense, or does that approach only further complicate today’s distributed networks? The pressure is prompting a fresh look at unified security platforms as a way to reduce complexity and costs, improve visibility and regain control.”
  • An SC Media commentator identifies “seven identity security best practices for the Agentic AI era.”
    • “Execute regular identity security risk assessments: Leverage tools that can clearly show what AI agents operate in our environment, including those that are operating as shadow IT. This analysis should put risks in clear context, including agent security posture, and potential escalation paths.
    • “Encrypt credentials: Put them in a secure vault, with automatic key rotation to make it harder to steal or reuse valid credentials.
    • “Restrict remote access to systems: Use leverage tooling that can perform automated credential injection from the company’s vaults to prevent adversary-in-the-middle attacks.
    • “Use workload identity to avoid long-lived tokens: Also use scoped permissions, whether OAuth-based or otherwise, to reduce the “blast radius” of stolen credentials.
    • “Limit permissions on endpoints with endpoint privilege management tools: Default permissions to “standard user” and set up policies that limit what local agents can do on those systems. Remove standing policies and replace them with JIT or time-limited policies and permissions.
    • “Implement IP allowlisting: This will reject AI agent requests coming from non-authorized locations.
    • “Log and audit all privileged behavior: Do this in all systems, whether that’s through tools such as session logs, shipping event logs to a SIEM, or using anomalous behavior analysis tools in the SOC.”
  • Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

Thursday report

David Ermer–CDC, COVID-19 vaccine, FDA, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, Mental health care, No Surprises Act, Obesity, Patient safety, Rx coverage, Telehealth, U.S. Healthcare–

Simplicity is a virtue.

From Washington, DC,

  • The American Hospital Association News reports,
    • “The departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the Treasury [and the Office of Personnel Management] issued a final rule May 28 intended to improve the functioning of the No Surprises Act (NSA) independent dispute resolution process. The rule streamlines communication between payers, providers and certified IDR entities and clarifies timelines and processes. It improves the functionality of the IDR process by finalizing various changes, including allowing up to 50 items and services to be batched in the same payment dispute. The final rule also increases access to the IDR process by reducing the administrative fees associated with it. The AHA supported many of these changes in comments on the proposed rule.”
  • The rule decreases the federal government fee for handling an NSA arbitration from $115 per party to $15 per party. The FEHBlog expects the arbitrators’ fees to increase accordingly over time. No good deed, etc.
  • The FEHBlog also expected the final rule to include an administrative remedy that would allow providers and payers to enforce or challenge arbitration awards.
  • The FEHBlog agrees with AHIP’s comments on the final rule.
    • “While the focus on addressing flawed incentives in the IDR process is a significant first step, more action is needed to protect Americans from unconscionable price gouging by some PE-backed providers and IDR middlemen.” – Chris Bond, AHIP spokesman”
  • Tammy Flanagan, writing in Govexec, discusses “[w]hat retiring feds should do before asking for help.
    • “Clear timelines, complete records and focused questions can make retirement problems easier to resolve, especially as agencies face mounting workloads.”
  • Federal News Network tells us,
    • “The Postal Service is putting immediate restrictions on nonessential spending to avoid running out of cash sooner than expected.
    • “Postmaster General David Steiner wrote in a memo Tuesday that the restrictions will impact hiring, travel and training as well as other areas of spending. Departments within USPS may be asked to provide a summary of “cost-containment actions taken and expected savings.”
    • “Steiner told members of the House Oversight Committee in March that USPS will run out of cash in early 2027, as long as it continues to pay its bills on time. But USPS is relying on some emergency measures to conserve cash.
    • “As you are aware, we are currently experiencing a temporary cash-flow shortage that requires us to take decisive steps to manage our available resources responsibly,” Steiner wrote in the memo. “To protect core operations and ensure that we can continue meeting all essential obligations, we are implementing immediate restrictions on non-essential spending across all departments.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • MedPage Today reports,
    • “The FDA’s vaccine advisors voted 8 to 0, with one abstention, in favor of a monovalent XFG vaccine for COVID-19 shots for the 2026-2027 season.
    • “The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) also discussed the need to target the long-simmering BA.3.2 variant, also known as “cicada,” though most expressed confidence that targeting XFG was the right way to go.
    • “The XFG variant is the most common variant in the U.S. right now, and looking at the other JN.1 variants that may be coming up, I still think that the BA.3.2 variant is not as common. I think we have to keep surveillance very vigilant though,” said Anna Durbin, MD, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, adding that the “immunogenicity of the vaccines looks good, so I was very comfortable voting yes.”
  • Fierce Pharma relates,
    • “AstraZeneca has fired another volley in its bladder cancer competition with Merck’s Keytruda, with the FDA on Thursday clearing its PD-L1 inhibitor Imfinzi as part of the first immunotherapy combo regimen in patients with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) who haven’t previously received standard of care Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) treatment. 
    • “The green light clears Imfinzi in the indication alongside BCG induction and maintenance therapy, AZ said in a May 28 release. 
    • “This marks the second recent bladder cancer nod for Imfinzi, which was approved in March of last year in muscle invasive bladder cancer (MIBC), in that instance in combination with the chemotherapies gemcitabine and cisplatin ahead of bladder-removing surgery and then on its own following the procedure.”
  • and
    • “As AbbVie continues to capitalize on its ImmunoGen deal, the growth of commercial antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) Elahere, another of the acquired company’s clinical assets has crossed the FDA finish line. 
    • “The FDA on Wednesday announced the approval of AbbVie’s CD123-direct ADC pivekimab sunirine-pvzy, which will hit the market under the Decnupaz moniker, as a treatment for adults with the rare blood cancer blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN). 
    • “The condition is a rare and aggressive cancer of the bone marrow and blood that can also affect organs like the lymph nodes, spleen and skin. Most patients with BPDCN present with purple-colored skin lesions and the malignancy is often diagnosed in more men than women, with most patients aged 60 years and older.” 
  • Health Exec tells us,
    • “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it’s aware of an issue with IV tubes, where black matter has been found within the walls of the plastic walls, signaling a contamination issue.
    • “ICU Medical said samples containing the particulates are being returned for analysis to help identify the problem. Until then, the devices are being removed from use and distribution.
    • “Typically sterile, these tubes are used to connect medication and fluid bags to patients, as administered through an IV line.
    • “ICU Medical and the FDA said in an announcement this could be a potentially high-risk issue, though there was no mention of patient injuries. The FDA described the notice as an early alert regarding a potential safety issue.”

From the judicial front,

  • Modern Healthcare reports,
    • “Clover Health won a lawsuit [in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia] challenging its 2026 Medicare Advantage star ratings.
    • “A federal court ruled that 20 quality measures the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used are improper.
    • “The decision could have industrywide implications because CMS rated all Medicare Advantage insurers on those metrics. 
    • “CMS filed a motion to reconsider the ruling.

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • The American Hospital Association News reports,
    • “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today released a report highlighting data on patients hospitalized during a 2025 measles outbreak centered in West Texas. There were 762 confirmed cases during the outbreak, which lasted from late January through mid-August 2025. The report found that of the 60 hospitalized patients, nearly 91% were children and adolescents under age 18 and nearly 56% were age 4 or younger. Additionally, 4 out of 5 hospitalized adults age 18-44 were pregnant women in their third trimester. Available medical records of 54 patients were reviewed. All 54 were found to be unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.”
  • Healio relates,
    • “Measures of ideal heart health including healthy levels of physical activity, BMI, BP and sleep were associated with lower risk for severe COVID-19 among people with no history of heart disease during the pandemic, researchers reported.
    • “For every 1 standard deviation increase in total American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 score, individuals without prior CVD experienced an approximately 20% reduced risk for severe COVID-19 infection, according to data published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.”
  • Health Day adds,
    • “Being incredibly fit shouldn’t increase a young adult’s risk of dangerous irregular heart rhythm, a new study says.
    • “Young male athletes and fitness buffs aren’t more likely to develop atrial fibrillation, despite earlier studies that showed an apparent link, researchers reported May 21 in the journal Circulation.
    • “Our study shows that there are good reasons to nuance and tone down the message, which has been widespread at times, that high levels of fitness or participating in races would pose a big risk to a person’s cardiovascular health,” said lead investigator Marcel Ballin, an associated researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden.
    • “The risk of atrial fibrillation is certainly not zero, but that said, the benefits are significantly greater,” he said in a news release.”
  • and
    • “Adopting low-insulinemic and planetary health diets during menopause is associated with optimized weight management, according to a study published online May 20 in JAMA Network Open.
    • “Tong Xia, M.D., Ph.D., from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and colleagues compared dietary patterns and their associations with weight gain and obesity risk in the years surrounding menopause. The analysis included 38,283 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study II, with 12-year observations surrounding menopause.
    • “The researchers found that after adjusting for age, race and ethnicity, marital status, income, postmenopausal hormone therapy use, parity, smoking, alcohol, energy intake, physical activity, and baseline body mass index, the reverse empirical dietary index for hyperinsulinemia (EDIH; quintile 5 versus 1) was associated with the largest reduction in weight gain (mean, −0.28 kg/year). The lowest risk for incident obesity was seen with the Planetary Health Diet Index (PHDI; hazard ratio, 0.46) and reverse EDIH (hazard ratio, 0.51). The largest positive correlations in the EDIH were seen with red or processed meats, sodium, and French fries, while for the PHDI, the largest positive correlations were seen with nuts, unsaturated fats, whole-grain carbohydrates, and vegetable protein.” 
  • The Washington Post informs us,
    • Ozempic was supposed to be a gut story. Then Allison Shapiro looked at the brain scans.
    • An assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz, she was part of a team studying 13 teens and young women with a hormonal disorder affecting the ovaries who were put on GLP-1 drugs. As part of testing to catalogue the effect of the medication on their bodies, Shapiro took snapshots of their brains before and after.
    • She was astonished to find extensive changes.
    • Within only a few months, the brain connections in the salience network, which helps target attention, had multiplied.
    • “We didn’t expect to see this effect, and we really don’t know what it means,” Shapiro said.”

  • BioPharma Dive tells us,
    • “An RNA-based shot developed by GSK and Ionis Pharmaceuticals helped wipe out hepatitis B in about a fifth of the patients who received it in a pair of clinical trials, according to study results published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
    • “Called bepirovirsen, the shot could represent an important advance for people with chronic hepatitis B infections, less than 1% of whom can achieve such a “functional cure” with the help of oral antivirals. None of the participants who received a placebo hit that mark in the two trials presented Thursday.
    • ‘The Food and Drug Administration is already reviewing an approval application for bepirovirsen, and has granted the drug “fast track” and “breakthrough therapy” designations that could speed up its evaluation. An approval decision is expected no later than Oct. 26.”
  • Genetic Engineering and BioTechnology News points out,
    • “Biohub, the non-profit research organization co-founded by Priscilla Chan, MD, and Mark Zuckerberg, has now unveiled the latest update to the ESM protein language model family, with expanded capabilities in binder design and protein function mapping for therapeutic discovery. The release comes just seven months after Biohub recruited the team behind EvolutionaryScale. 
    • “The system includes ESMC (Evolutionary Scale Modeling Cambrian), a language model trained on approximately 2.8 billion sequences drawn from a breadth of life, including organisms adapted to extreme environments, and more than 20,000 types of proteins found in the human body. Evolutionary information encoded in ESMC is translated into atomic-resolution protein structures and interactions using the design engine and prediction model, ESMFold2. 
    • “Alex Rives, PhD, head of science at Biohub and former chief scientist at EvolutionaryScale, presented the work at this week’s “AI in Biology” symposium at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.  
    • “These models aim to transform the earliest stages of drug discovery by making biology more programmable. While traditional discovery workflows rely on slow and resource intensive experimental screens to identify promising drug candidates, rational protein design guided by in silico predictions has the potential to dramatically accelerate development timelines. 
    • “We’re at an exciting point in protein biology where accurate digital representations allow asking experimental questions at a scale that wouldn’t be possible in the laboratory,” Rives told GEN Edge.”  

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Modern Healthcare reports,
    • “Highmark Health recovered in the first quarter after reporting losses last year, the health system and insurer announced Thursday.
    • “The Pittsburgh-based nonprofit company reported a 1,308% jump in first-quarter net income to $183 million and a 1,340% improvement in operating income to $216 million. Revenues grew 3.8% to $8.3 billion. Highmark Health lost $175 million in 2025.
    • “Highmark Health Plans’ strategic adjustments in Medicare and Medicaid drove the rebound, Highmark Health Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer Carl Daley said.” 
  • Fierce Pharma relates
    • “The top pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) in the U.S., CVS Caremark, will restore coverage to obesity products from Eli Lilly, allowing a significant number of patients to gain access to the drugs through their existing insurance.
    • “CVS will begin covering Lilly’s GLP-1 pill Foundayo on Monday of next week, June 1, while coverage of Lilly’s injected treatment Zepbound begins on October 1. CVS Caremark, which is the pharmacy chain’s drug benefits unit, is the largest PBM in the country.”
  • and 
    • “CVS Health is growing its partnership with Salesforce, leveraging its agentic AI-driven Agentforce Health to boost personalization in its call centers.
    • “The companies announced on Thursday morning that the platform will connect data across CVS, including Aetna and Caremark, to make it easier for call center teams to address a member’s unique needs in a single interaction when possible.
    • “The Agentforce tool will surface critical insights to call center teams in advance, preparing them more effectively for conversations. The goal, the partners said, is to improve the experience for both the member and the workers through a more streamlined interaction.”
  • OptumRx, writing in Linked In, discusses the four drug classes that drive spending.
    • Inflamatory conditions drugs,
    • Oncology drugs,
    • Diabetes drugs, and
    • Obestty Drugs.
  • Beckers Payer Issues points out,
    • “CVS Health’s insurance branch will roll out “Aetna Mental Health On Demand” in 2027, the company said in a May 28 news release.
    • “Aetna members who are at least 13 years old will be able to access licensed clinicians via chat, phone or video. These professionals are trained on a “single-session intervention model” to drive immediate impact, such as through crisis management. Clinicians can provide a personalized plan, advocate for members, connect them with more resources and help with follow-ups and further care coordination.
    • “The platform also contains integrated AI tools for note-taking and administrative tasks. Clinicians participated in hundreds of chats and were able to respond to members within 13 seconds, the news release said about an initial rollout.” 
  • Healthcare Dive tells us,
    • “Teladoc Health said Thursday it is partnering with Walmart to add its virtual care services to the retail giant’s digital healthcare platform.
    • “With the partnership, Teladoc’s virtual care offerings — including urgent care, dermatology and nutrition support — are now available through Walmart’s Better Care Services platform, which connects customers to third-party digital health providers. 
    • “The deal should put Teladoc’s services in front of more potential patients, Kelly Bliss, president of the company’s U.S. group health business, told Healthcare Dive. “We have the largest nationwide network of virtual care providers in the country, and so we want to activate that network and our clinical services wherever people are making health decisions,” she said.”
  •  and
    • “Amazon’s healthcare leader is stepping down from this summer, and the co-founder of telehealth company Amwell will replace him, the retail and technology giant said Wednesday. 
    • “Neil Lindsay, who became senior vice president of Amazon Health Services in 2021, is leaving to pursue personal projects, he said in a message to Amazon employees.
    • “Dr. Roy Schoenberg, the former co-CEO of Amwell who helped found the telehealth provider two decades ago, will start as new head of Amazon’s health business on July 1. Lindsay will stay on as an advisor to Schoenberg through the end of the year.”
  • Per MedTech Dive.
    • “Ōura plans to roll out a swath of health and wellness features in June, following the launch of its latest smart ring.
    • “Among the new additions will be a tool to track nighttime blood pressure patterns and the ability to view nighttime breathing data over a 30-day period. Ōura announced the features, along with its Ōura Ring 5, on Thursday.
    • “Jason Russell, vice president of consumer software product at Ōura, told MedTech Dive that the blood pressure feature is intended to show trends in overnight changes and the relationship to daily habits, such as sleep, stress and exercise. 
    • “Ōura plans to offer blood pressure signals as a wellness feature, meaning it would not be regulated as a medical device, but there are some limitations on what it can tell users.”  

Cybersecurity Saturday

David Ermer–Congress, Cybersecurity, Generative AI–

From the War with Iran front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports yesterday,
    • “Iranian government-backed hackers are using spear-phishing attacks and remote access Trojans (RATs) to spy on “high-value sectors” in the U.S. and the Middle East as part of Tehran’s response to the U.S.-Israeli war, according to Palo Alto Networks.
    • “The company’s Unit 42 researchers recently discovered six new RATs that an Iran-linked group the researchers call Screening Serpens has used for espionage purposes. The group “has increased its operations” since the war began, the researchers said, and malware metadata suggests that it has attacked “targets across the U.S., Israel and the [United Arab Emirates] as well as two additional Middle Eastern entities.”
    • “Screening Serpens — which other researchers call UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm and Nimbus Manticore — has “consistently set its sights on high-value sectors,” Palo Alto Networks said, especially in the aerospace, defense and telecommunications industries.
    • “A defining characteristic of these recent campaigns is the deep personalization of the attackers’ lures,” researchers wrote. “By leveraging tailored social engineering tactics, including fake job requisitions and spoofed video conferencing meeting invitations, the attackers lure victims into initiating the infection chain, thereby exposing their organizations to further exploitation.”
  • Industrial Cyber adds,
    • “Ransomware groups are increasingly being used as proxy weapons in geopolitical cyber warfare, enabling nation-states to exert pressure on their adversaries while maintaining plausible deniability. What used to be financially motivated cybercrime and targeting can now influence operations and cause operational disruption. While the change has been incremental, it has been unmistakable. Criminal groups, ideological hacktivists, and state-aligned adversaries are converging and sharing environments, infrastructure, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), access brokers, and, at times, even strategic objectives.
    • “Operations linked to Iran demonstrate the sprawl between cybercrime, espionage and industrial sabotage as ever closer. A recent investigation exposed claims by pro-Iran hackers that they altered on-the-ground conditions to target critical wheat reserves, demonstrating how cyber activity can directly affect food security and industry. Once the contact is made, these adversaries can choose how and when to attack.”

From the Project Glasswing front,

  • Anthropic offers a look back at the project’s first month.
  • The Wall Street Journal adds,
    • “Anthropic is letting Mythos users [participating in Project Glasswing] share cybersecurity threats with others who may face similar vulnerabilities.
    • “Anthropic modified its previous stance amid concerns that limiting access to the information could hurt smaller companies.
    • “The new policy highlights challenges facing artificial-intelligence companies that are restricting access to their best models.’

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

  • Cyberscoop reports,
    • “Two cybersecurity-focused members of Congress agreed Thursday [May 21, 2026] that reductions to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have done too much damage to an agency essential to defending civilian networks against foreign adversaries.
    • “Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., spoke during a panel at the National Cyber Innovation Forum. Despite representing different parties, and serving on different congressional committees, the two lawmakers offered closely aligned assessments of CISA’s role and the consequences of recent cuts.” * * *
    • “In the model both lawmakers endorsed, they pushed for CISA to play more of a role after an intrusion, helping affected entities restore their networks while the FBI works to identify the source. Walkinshaw said advanced artificial intelligence expands the attack surface and makes that kind of centralized support more important.”
  • The Wall Street Journal relates,
    • “State cybersecurity officials urged the federal government on Thursday to roll back cuts to cybersecurity programs, arguing that deteriorating federal support weakens defenses just as artificial intelligence and nation-state belligerence are introducing significant new threats.
    • “Technology and cyber officials from New York, Florida and Tennessee told a House Homeland Security Committee hearing that states must now defend against advanced threats as federal backing diminishes.
    • “The witnesses cited the pending expiration of the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, significant budget and workforce cuts to federal agencies and new limits on the information-sharing platforms that state governments rely on to track threats.”
  • Cyberscoop adds,
    • “Securing some of the open-source technology that serves as the backbone for all modern digital infrastructure is going to require some “hard decisions” amid a wave of malware attacks, the leader of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Thursday [May 21, 2026].
    • “The open-source community is one that I’m particularly worried about when we start to think about rapid escalation of vulnerability discovery,” acting director Nick Andersen said, referencing a cartoon about how key technologies that underpin the internet are often maintained by a single person.” * * *
    • “CISA has been working with industry and others “to modify our approach to vulnerability management, modify our approach to coordinated vulnerability disclosure, modify our approach to remediation, with the explicit understanding that we’re just not going to be able to keep up using traditional mechanisms,” Andersen said, speaking at the National Cyber Innovation Forum in Washington, D.C.
    • “The government and private sector can work together to identify the biggest threats and then give them the right level of attention, he said. On the federal government side, that means working to get a full picture of the extent of reliance on open-source technologies.” 
  • and
    • “President Donald Trump said he would postpone the release of an executive order that would set up a 90-day testing and vetting regime for frontier AI models, hours before the White House was set to publicly announce the signing. 
    • “Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Thursday [May 21, 2026], Trump said he opted to delay the order “because I didn’t like certain aspects of it” and expressed concerns that it could harm U.S. AI industry competition with countries like China. 
  • Cyberscoop tells us,
    • “Authorities arrested and unsealed charges against a Canadian man accused of running Kimwolf, one of the most far-reaching DDoS botnets on record, the Justice Department said Thursday.
    • “Jacob Butler was arrested Wednesday [May 20, 2026] in Ottawa, Canada, and awaits extradition to the United States where he is charged with aiding and abetting computer intrusions and, if convicted, faces up to 10 years in prison.
    • “Investigators said the 23-year-old, also known as “Dort,” was a principal administrator of Kimwolf, a variant of the record-setting Aisuru DDoS botnet that spread like wildfire and eventually took over more than 2 million Android TV devices after its operators figured out how to abuse residential-proxy networks for local control.”
  • and
    • “European authorities took down a prominent virtual private network service and arrested the alleged administrator behind an operation that cybercriminals used to steal data, commit fraud and ransomware attacks, Europol said Thursday [May 21, 2026]. 
    • “First VPN, which was promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums, gained popularity for providing services that allowed users to hide their infrastructure and identities. Officials said the service was entrenched in the cybercrime world and appeared in almost every major recent cybercrime investigation aided by Europol.
    • “For years, cybercriminals saw this VPN service as a gateway to anonymity,” Edvardas Šileris, head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, said in a statement. 
    • “They believed it would keep them beyond the reach of law enforcement,” Šileris added. “This operation proves them wrong. Taking it offline removes a critical layer of protection that criminals depended on to operate, communicate and evade law enforcement.”
  • Security Week adds,
    • “Authorities in North America and Europe have participated in a law enforcement operation to disrupt First VPN, a popular cybercrime service used for ransomware and other attacks.
    • “According to the FBI, First VPN has been active since 2014, providing 32 exit nodes across 27 countries at the time of its disruption. The service, advertised on Russian-language dark web cybercrime forums, has been used by at least 25 ransomware groups for network reconnaissance and intrusions.”
    • “Bitdefender, which was involved in the takedown, pointed out that the 506 users are a subset of First VPN’s customer base, and investigators will determine which of them can be linked to criminal operations. 
    • “Some will be traced to known ransomware groups. Others will reveal fraud operations, data theft campaigns, or cybercrime-as-a-service infrastructure we didn’t know existed,” Bitdefender said.
    • “New anonymization services will appear. The economic demand hasn’t changed. But each takedown shortens the operational window of the next service and raises the barrier for actors who relied on turnkey solutions,” the cybersecurity firm added. “First VPN advertised itself as a service criminals could trust to keep them beyond law enforcement’s reach. The operation proved that claim wrong, and every actor evaluating the next anonymization service now knows the same risk exists.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

  • Health Exec reports,
    • “The largest public health system in the U.S. confirmed in a filing with the Department of Health and Human Services that a data breach on its network impacted 1.8 million patients, exposing their personal data to hackers.
    • “The data breach, which was said to have lasted for months, was revealed by NYC Health + Hospitals in March. At the time, the health system said it first discovered “suspicious activity” on its network in February, at which time it moved to “immediately” secure its systems from access by the unauthorized third-party.
    • “An investigation found cybercriminals had been inside its IT infrastructure since November 2025, stemming from a breach on an unnamed vendor the organization contracts with for services.”
  • Dark Reading relates,
    • “Defenders are dealing with an influx of vulnerabilities like never before, and patch prioritization has never been more critical, according to Verizon Business’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). This year’s report confirmed several ongoing trends on the vulnerability exploitation and around threat actors abusing AI, for example — but the 2026 DBIR more broadly promotes sticking to the cybersecurity fundamentals as the industry undergoes massive change.
    • “And indeed, defenders in the past year have been tasked with handling everything from self-replicating worms infesting software components to preparing for large language models (LLMs) that can supposedly discover critical zero-day vulnerabilities all on their own.
    • “Most striking in the DBIR might be the statistics that show vulnerability exploitation to be the most common initial access vector for breaches last year, up 31% from the previous year. Meanwhile, only 26% of critical vulnerabilities (defined as those in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerability catalog) were fully remediated by organizations in 2025, compared to 38% the previous year. Just over half (58%) were partially remediated last year, and 16% remained unaddressed.” * * *
    • “While organizations perhaps got worse at patching, Verizon also observed a dramatic increase in the number of vulnerability detections observed year over year, likely driven by AI-assisted bug hunting. “There were 68.7 million records in the 2022 dataset and 527.3 million in 2025 — almost eight times the volume,” the DBIR reads.”
  • The HIPAA Journal tells us,
    • “Verizon has published its 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, which shows that the healthcare sector continues to be targeted by cybercriminal groups. The sector is having to contend with sustained multi-vector attacks, including ransomware, unpatched vulnerabilities, and human error. Regardless of the cause, the attacks are putting patient privacy, safety, and care at risk.
    • “Verizon tracked 1,492 healthcare incidents for its 2026 report, including 1,438 confirmed data disclosures, a majority of which were due to ransomware-driven system intrusions achieved through multiple attack vectors, including the exploitation of vulnerabilities (20%), phishing attacks (14%), stolen credentials (11%), and employee errors (11%). Threat actors are being given far too big a window of opportunity to exploit known vulnerabilities. Verizon found that in 2025, only 26% of critical vulnerabilities were fully remediated, with a median time for resolution stretching to 43 days. In healthcare, where complex legacy systems are the norm, the window of opportunity is greater, giving threat actors a wide attack window.
    • “While external actors accounted for the majority of incidents, insider breaches remain common in healthcare. Internal actors were behind 19% of breaches. As Verizon notes, human error continues to be a chronic source of breaches. The human element was involved in 54% of incidents, including misconfigurations, misdirected communications, the loss/theft of unencrypted devices, and poor cyber hygiene.
    • “The most common human-related cause of healthcare data incidents was misdelivery, which accounted for around 40% of incidents, followed by loss incidents at around 25%, and misconfigurations at around 20%. While greater investment in cybersecurity will help to address the 81% of breaches due to external actors, security awareness training plays an important part in preventing data breaches. Employees need to be made aware of security fundamentals and be taught the importance of practicing good cyber hygiene. Social engineering was the third main cause of healthcare breaches in 2025, the majority of which were due to phishing, followed by pretexting – these attack techniques need to be covered in depth in training courses.”
  • CISA added ten known exploited vulnerabilities (KVEs) to its catalog this week.
  • Cybersecurity Dive adds,
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is now letting security experts nominate vulnerabilities to the agency’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
    • “CISA on Thursday [May 21, 2026] published a form that technology vendors, independent researchers and anyone else can use to warn CISA that hackers are exploiting a vulnerability and it should be added to the KEV.
    • “This new reporting capability enhances CISA’s ability to identify, validate, and quickly share critical threat information,” Chris Butera, CISA’s acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement. “Early detection and coordinated vulnerability disclosure are among the most powerful tools we have to reduce risk at scale.”\
  • and
    • “Hackers stole data from thousands of GitHub repositories, the code-hosting giant said on Tuesday [May 19, 2026].
    • “While we currently have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub’s internal repositories (such as our customers’ enterprises, organizations, and repositories), we are closely monitoring our infrastructure for follow-on activity,” the company said in a post on X.
    • “On Wednesday [May 20, 2026], the company confirmed that attackers had compromised roughly 3,800 repositories after a GitHub employee used a malware-infected Visual Studio Code extension.
    • “We continue to analyze logs, validate secret rotation, and monitor for any follow-on activity,” GitHub said.”
  • Cyberscoop informs us,
    • “The FBI is warning organizations and defenders about Kali365, a growing phishing-as-a-service platform that retrieves Microsoft 365 access tokens, issuing a public service announcement Thursday [May 21, 2026]. 
    • “The toolkit bypasses multi-factor authentication and abuses OAuth device code authorizations via phishing lures impersonating common enterprise services. This technique grants cybercriminal-controlled applications access to Microsoft 365 accounts, opening victims up to a host of follow-on malicious activity, including data theft, fraud, extortion and ransomware attacks.
    • “Kali365 is one of many rapidly emerging device-code phishing tools, which are gaining popularity as a more effective means for cybercriminals to circumvent security controls while abusing legitimate Microsoft device authorization pages, according to researchers.
    • “Instead of gaining access to accounts via phishing kits that steal credentials and second-factor authentication codes, device-code phishing platforms connect a malicious app to a legitimate account with a single code. The process requires fewer steps and less interaction with the user, but victims do have to copy-and-paste a code generated by the Kali365 platform to grant access.”
  • Cyber Insider points out,
    • “Hidden audio commands can hijack AI voice assistants and transcription tools without users hearing anything unusual, according to new research set to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy next week.
    • “The study shows that carefully crafted audio clips can elicit unauthorized actions from audio-language models (LALMs), including downloading files, sending emails, and performing web searches.
    • “The attack, dubbed “AudioHijack,” was developed by researchers from Zhejiang University, Nanyang Technological University, and the National University of Singapore. The team describes the attack as a form of “auditory prompt injection,” in which malicious instructions are embedded in ordinary audio using adversarial perturbations that remain nearly imperceptible to human listeners.
    • “Large audio-language models are increasingly powering voice assistants, meeting transcription services, customer support bots, and multimodal AI systems capable of both understanding and generating speech. Some platforms can also interact with external tools and services, allowing them to search the web, operate apps, or execute commands on behalf of users. According to the researchers, these capabilities significantly expand the attack surface.
    • “Attackers could potentially hide malicious prompts inside music, videos, voice notes, or even live conversations uploaded to AI services. The paper also describes scenarios in which hidden audio could be injected into Zoom meetings or multimedia content processed by AI assistants.”
  • The Hacker News notes,
    • “In February 2026, a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform called EvilTokens went live. Within five weeks, it had compromised more than 340 Microsoft 365 organizations across five countries. 
    • “The targets of the platform received a message asking them to enter a short code at microsoft.com/devicelogin and complete their normal MFA challenge, then walked away believing they had verified a routine sign-in. They had actually handed the operator a valid refresh token scoped to their mailbox, drive, calendar, and contacts, with the lifespan of a tenant policy rather than a session.
    • ‘The operator never needed a password, never tripped an MFA prompt, and never produced a sign-in event that looked like an intrusion. The attack succeeded because the OAuth consent screen has become an instinctive click, and the controls built to stop credential phishing do not look at the consent layer.
    • “Security researchers call the resulting condition consent phishing or OAuth grant abuse. The phishing click that mattered last decade handed over a password. The phishing click that matters now hands over a refresh token, and it sits structurally below the identity controls most organizations still treat as the perimeter.”

From the ransomware front,

  • Sophos reports,
    • “SophosLabs analysts investigated WantToCry ransomware attacks that involved the threat actors abusing the Server Message Block (SMB) service for initial access and then exfiltrating files to attacker-controlled infrastructure for remote encryption. The detection surface is significantly reduced because WantToCry operates without local malware execution, and there is no post-compromise activity beyond exfiltrating files and rewriting them to disk.
    • “The WantToCry name appears to be a reference to the notorious WannaCry (also known as WCry) ransomware worm, which propagated via a vulnerability in SMB at the start of 2017. While WantToCry is not self-propagating and there is no evidence to suggest that the two operations are connected, organizations with internet-exposed SMB services are similarly at risk.” * * *
    • “As with all ransomware activity, prevention remains key to mitigating the threat of remote ransomware operations like WantToCry. Preventive measures include disabling the SMBv1 protocol across the organization, removing “guest” or anonymous SMB access, and blocking inbound SMB traffic (ports TCP/139 and TCP/445) at all internet-facing firewalls. Additionally, it is important to ensure that backups cannot be accessed via SMB protocols.
    • “Organizations should also implement network-level controls and file content monitoring to address this attack methodology effectively. A tool like Sophos CryptoGuard can identify, block, and roll back encryption activity performed via SMB protocols.
    • “WantToCry relies on weak authentication and internet exposure rather than on software vulnerabilities or malware delivery mechanisms. Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions can identify reconnaissance and brute-force attempts against SMB services, providing early warnings of potential WantToCry operations.”
  • Bleeping Computer relates,
    • “Threat actors brute-forced VPN credentials and bypassed multi-factor authentication (MFA) on SonicWall Gen6 SSL-VPN appliances to deploy tools used in ransomware attacks.
    • “During the intrusions, the hacker took between 30 and 60 minutes to log in, do network reconnaissance, test credential reuse on internal systems, and log out.
    • “SonicWall warned in a security advisory for CVE-2024-12802 that installing the firmware update alone on Gen6 devices does not fully mitigate the vulnerability, and a manual reconfiguration of the LDAP server is required. Failing to do so leaves open the possibility of bypassing MFA protection.”
  • The American Hospital Association lets us know,
    • “Microsoft announced May 19 that it disrupted operations of Fox Tempest, a threat actor operating as a malware-signing-as-a-service used by cybercriminals to deploy malicious code, including ransomware. Microsoft said Fox Tempest has enabled attacks on a range of sectors in the U.S. and internationally, including health care, education, government and financial services. The actor has been linked to other ransomware groups, including INC, Qilin and Akira. 
    • “One component of modern security is that software packages need to be digitally signed to prove their authenticity,” said Scott Gee, AHA deputy national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “Normally, these signatures can only be provided by trusted, verified sources. Fox Tempest provided these signatures to malware so that it appeared to be legitimate to security systems. This service enabled a number of ransomware actors to attack health care and other sectors. Microsoft has revoked over 1,000 certificates issued by Fox Tempest. Hospitals and health systems should ensure that certificate verification is enabled on their cybersecurity toolsets.” 
  • and
    • “Cyberattacks against hospitals, health systems and mission-critical health care third-party providers have surged in recent years. While these attacks often involve theft of patient data and medical research, the most concerning are high-impact ransomware attacks that continue to shut down critical medical systems, resulting in disruption and delays to health care delivery. There is no doubt that these types of disruptive attacks create a direct risk to patient and community safety. To be clear, these are not data-theft crimes, they are in fact “threat to life” crimes.
    • “The perpetrators of these foreign-based ransomware attacks are primarily, but not exclusively, Russian-speaking or based in Russia. Other adversarial nations that provide shelter for dangerous international criminals to launch cyberattacks against the U.S. are the usual suspects — Iran, China and North Korea.
    • “There have been thousands of ransomware and data theft attacks targeting U.S. health care over the last several years. In fact, the FBI reported that in 2025 alone, the health care sector suffered 460 ransomware attacks, far more than any other critical infrastructure sector. Since 2020, over 3,200 hacking incidents have been reported to the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, impacting 574 million individuals. Many incidents were actually encryption ransomware attacks accompanied by data theft — “the double extortion,” in which the perpetrators demand an additional ransom for both a decryption key to unlock systems and in exchange for not publishing stolen patient health records.
    • “The silver lining? We have a great deal of “battle experience” and tough lessons learned, which has helped us collaborate to harden systems and prepare for impact and recovery. We at the AHA, working with victims, the field and the federal government, have also been able to reliably identify strategic cyber risk related to third parties, patient safety and supply chain.
    • The top three risks are
      • Geopolitical tensions
      • Cyberattacks agains third parties, and
      • Autonomous Artificial Intelligence-generated and -facilitated Cyberattacks.

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

  • Cyberscooop reports,
    • “On Wednesday [May 20], Microsoft released two new red teaming tools — Rampartand Clarity — meant to help developers design more secure agentic software and assist incident responders in the face of ongoing breaches.
    • “Rampart is built on top of PyRIT, an existing open automation framework Microsoft developed for red teaming generative AI systems. But while PyRIT scans already-built systems for security flaws, Rampart is made to continuously test code for vulnerabilities during the development process, encoding both adversarial and benign testing scenarios into the software development pipeline to flag exploitable bugs and dependencies.
    • “Microsoft said Rampart was built to focus on cross-prompt injection attacks, where “an agent retrieves or processes potentially poisoned content from documents, emails, tickets, and other data sources that manipulate behavior indirectly.” It also confirms fixes or exploits work as intended through multiple rounds of testing, as opposed to tools that perform “single shot validation.”
    • “The second tool, Clarity, can be run as a desktop app, a web interface or directly embedded into a coding agent to provide real time security engineering guidance to developers at the outset of a project. It can categorize and track different business objectives related to the code and highlight downstream security implications along with more secure by design alternatives.”
  • Per Dark Reading,
    • “AI Agents Are Shifting Identity Security Budget Dynamics.”
    • “AI agent projects are proliferating throughout the enterprise, and those AI agent identities require management, security, and governance. New Omdia research shows the AI agent identity budget dynamics are very different than traditional IAM projects.”
  • Per Cyberscoop commentaries,
    • “The Canvas breach proved that prevention is no longer enough.
    • “Cybercriminals brought down the most widely used learning platform in North America. The Canvas breach is a blueprint for how SaaS attacks now work — and a warning about how unprepared most organizations still are.”
  • and
    • “The readiness paradox: Why a false sense of cyber confidence is becoming a liability
    • “As AI expands the attack surface and alert fatigue grows, cyber exposure management offers a clearer path to understanding where risk truly concentrates and how to reduce it before a crisis hits.”
  • Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

Friday report

David Ermer–CDC, CMS, Congress, FDA, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, Mental health care, NIH, Obesity, Patient safety, U.S. Healthcare, Uncategorized–

Simplificity is a virtue.

From Washington, DC

  • Roll Call reports,
    • “The House Appropriations Committee advanced a draft fiscal 2027 Legislative Branch spending bill on Wednesday that would slash the budget for the Government Accountability Office by nearly one-quarter and give a boost to Capitol Police.
    • “The party-line vote of 34-28 came after a contentious markup stretching late into the evening, as Democrats argued the GAO cut would undermine its mission.”
  • The Hill informs us,
    • “Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh was sworn in Friday beside President Trump, kicking off his term as the new head of the central bank at a critical time for the U.S. economy.” * * *
    • “Warsh, 56, returns to the Fed board after serving as a member from 2006 to 2011. He was nominated to the Fed by former President George W. Bush, whom he served as a White House economic adviser before becoming the youngest Fed board member in history.
    • A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Warsh also worked at Morgan Stanley and served in various academic and advisory roles outside of his government service. 
    • Warsh was most recently a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an influential conservative think tank known for its close ties to prominent Republican policymakers.
  • Healthcare Dive relates,
    • “The HHS is continuing its crackdown on healthcare fraud, launching a program that will use artificial intelligence to examine audits from states and other federal grant recipients — and potentially affect Medicaid funds.
    • “The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources will look across all states to analyze at least five years of audits that grantees file annually with the federal government, the department said Thursday. 
    • “The agency says past audits include internal control issues and “chronic” noncompliance. If recipients aren’t able to fix those problems, the HHS could temporarily withhold payments, hold back future funds, or suspend or terminate awards.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • The American Hospital Association News reports,
    • “The Food and Drug Administration has issued an early alert for all heart pump controllers by Abiomed, which sent a correction notice to all customers with updated use instructions. The FDA said that Abiomed identified an issue where if a patient is treated with a left ventricular Impella device and experiences an extended period longer than 80 minutes with no residual pulsatility, the Abiomed Automated Impella Controller may be forced to restart due to an internal software error.” 
  • Per an FDA news release,
    • “Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Hepcludex (bulevirtide-gmod) injection to treat chronic hepatitis delta virus (HDV) infection in adults without cirrhosis (advanced liver scarring) or with compensated cirrhosis. Bulevirtide is the first FDA-approved treatment for chronic HDV infection, a serious and life-threatening condition that can cause rapid development of liver fibrosis (scarring), liver cancer, liver failure, and even death.
    • “Today’s approval fills a critical gap in care for patients with chronic HDV infection, who until now have had no FDA-approved therapies available,” said Wendy Carter, D.O., Acting Director of the Office of Infectious Diseases in FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “For individuals living with this chronic viral infection, this new treatment option offers hope in managing a disease that can rapidly progress to serious liver complications.”

From the judicial front,

  • Bloomberg Law reports,
    • “The importance of the $885 million antitrust verdict this week against Takeda Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. had less to do with the nine-figure damages than ending private plaintiffs’ losing streak challenging deals delaying cheaper generics.
    • “The Boston federal jury’s finding that Takeda improperly paid a competitor to delay it from bringing a generic version of its Amitiza constipation medication to market marked the first time a private plaintiff won at trial in a reverse-payment case.
    • “Most challenges to deals between branded drug companies and generic makers either settle or are dismissed before reaching trial, with the more nuanced agreements sometimes making it to a jury. Three have been tried before a jury since the US Supreme Court put drugmakers on notice that the dealings could run afoul of antitrust laws. Until Monday, juries had rejected plaintiffs’ claims each time. 
    • “I expect the case to send ripples through legal departments — if not boardrooms — across the country,” said Robin Feldman, a law professor at the University of California in San Francisco who studies pharmaceutical regulation and intellectual property. She called the verdict a “groundbreaking decision.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today,
    • “RSV activity started later than usual in most parts of the United States, but illnesses are not more severe than recent years. Activity has peaked in most regions of the country. Because of the later start, some areas of the country may continue to see higher levels of RSV through May. Emergency department visits and hospitalizations for RSV are highest among infants and children less than 4 years old. COVID-19 activity is low in most areas of the country. Seasonal influenza activity is low.”
  • The University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP reports,
    • “As the nation moves closer to topping last year’s measles total in just the first half of 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today confirmed 59 new cases in a nationwide outbreak that has now reached 1,952 infections. 
    • “All but nine cases are locally acquired, with the rest related to international travel. The total for all of last year was 2,288 confirmed cases.”
  • and
    • “Although an Ebola outbreak is growing rapidly in central Africa, experts say it doesn’t pose a public health threat to the United States.
    • “The outbreak, centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has grown to nearly 750 suspected cases and more than 170 deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today. Although the risk from Ebola in the DRC is high, the risk of global spread is low, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, said. 
    • “Many US infectious diseases experts agree.
    • “This is a horrible situation in affected areas of Africa,” said Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, which publishes CIDRAP News. “But for the world, it is not.”
    • “That’s because Ebola, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids, is far more difficult to spread than the airborne respiratory viruses that Americans have confronted in recent years, such as influenza, COVID-19, measles, and even the Andes strain of the hantavirus, which recently caused an outbreak on a cruise ship.”
  • BioPharma Dive points out,
    • “ASCO26: 5 data snapshots ahead of the year’s biggest cancer drug meeting.
    • “Clinical trial abstracts posted Thursday ahead of this year’s ASCO meeting gave a peek at anticipated datasets from Merck, BioNTech, Eli Lilly and Moderna.”
  • Per a National Institutes of Health news release,
    • “A team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have unveiled new details about the events GLP-1 receptor agonists trigger within neurons, which have been largely unexplored until now. A study in mice identified key intracellular signaling processes that are tied to the weight-loss effects of the GLP-1 drug semaglutide. The findings improve our understanding of how increasingly prevalent GLP-1s may influence human behavior and identify new opportunities to potentially enhance treatment.
    • “The weight-loss benefits of GLP-1s are well documented and scientists generally know the brain regions associated with these effects. However, several questions remain, such as why responses to medication differ between patients and why the effects for most eventually plateau.
    • “We know much less about the nuts and bolts of what goes on within the neurons that these medications target. By digging into these mechanisms, we’re beginning to answer some of these questions,” said co-corresponding author Andrew Lutas, Ph.D., an investigator at NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).”
  • CNN reports,
    • “Pregnant women are routinely advised to take prenatal vitamins for their health and their baby’s development. Now, a new study published Monday in JAMA Network Open concluded that children whose mothers received higher-dose vitamin D supplements during pregnancy performed better on certain memory tests at age 10.”
  • MedPage Today relates,
    • “Preserved global brain structure appeared to buffer cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s pathology.
    • “Younger-appearing brains had weaker links between pathology and poorer outcomes in multiple cognitive domains.
    • “Other measures of brain reserve or cognitive reserve showed no clear protective cognitive effect.”
  • Health Day tells us,
    • “Middle-aged people who have migraine with an aura could be more at risk for stroke.
    • “Those who had migraine with aura had a 73% increased risk of stroke
    • “Middle-aged men who suffered any kind of migraine had a more than 3.5-fold increased risk of stroke.”
  • and
    • “Use of calcium, vitamin D, or combined supplementation has little to no effect on the prevention of fractures and falls in adults, according to a review published online May 20 in The BMJ.
    • “Olivier Massé, Pharm.D., from CIUSSS du Nord-de-l’Île-de Montréal, and colleagues conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine the effect of calcium, vitamin D, or combined supplementation on fractures and falls in adults. A total of 69 trials, with 153,902 participants, were included in the review.
    • “Most trial participants were community dwelling (87 percent) and not at high fracture or fall risk (73 percent). The researchers found that little to no effect was found from use of calcium supplements (risk ratio, 0.91), vitamin D supplements (risk ratio, 1.00), or combined supplementation (risk ratio, 0.91) for the primary outcome of any fracture. There was little to no effect on other fracture and fall outcomes seen for calcium, vitamin D, or combined supplementation, based mainly on moderate-to-high certainty of evidence. After extensive exploration of heterogeneity across multiple subgroup analyses, the findings remained robust.”
  • BioPharma Dive informs us,
    • “The outlook for an experimental Parkinson’s disease drug dimmed on Thursday with the announcement that it had failed a key clinical trial.
    • “Developed through a partnership Denali Therapeutics and Biogen, the drug is designed to inhibit an enzyme tied to one of the most common genetic drivers of Parkinson’s: a gene called LRRK2. When this gene mutates, it causes the waste disposal systems in cells to malfunction, leading to the buildup of toxic proteins that damage and destroy neurons.
    • “In 2022, Biogen and Denali kicked off what would ultimately become a nearly 650-person trial that pitted their drug against a placebo. The companies are now saying this mid-stage study showed the drug — codenamed BIIB122 — was not significantly better at slowing the disease progression, as measured by a well-known scale clinicians use to assess how Parkinson’s is affecting a patient’s movement and daily life.”

From the U.S. healthcare business and artificial intelligence front,

  • Per an EBRI news release,
    • “The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI)/Greenwald Research Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey found that the majority of insured individuals still receive health insurance through their employer.
    • “Employment-based health coverage remained the dominant source of health insurance for privately insured adults, with six in 10 receiving coverage through their own job.” * * *
    • “Coverage patterns have been largely stable, with about one-third enrolled in individual-only coverage and most others covering a spouse or partner.”
  • Fierce Pharma relates,
    • “With both Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s oral GLP-1s establishing their footing in the U.S. obesity market, the companies’ respective Wegovy pill and orforglipron tablet Foundayo are making their mark on prescription trends for a class previously confined primarily to injectables.
    • “Looking at the past four weeks, total U.S. GLP-1 prescriptions were up 3.6%, compared to 1.8% at the same time last year, analysts at Citi wrote in a Friday note to clients, citing script tracking data from IQVIA. The Citi team attributed that momentum to the ability of Novo’s and Lilly’s new oral launches to “broaden and reshape the market” for obesity incretin drugs.”
  • MedCity News considers whether “Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Wellness Appeal to Employers?”
    • Employer advocates said Cost Plus Wellness could help spur more direct contracting and transparency in healthcare, though they questioned whether the model can scale and adequately measure provider quality and outcomes.
  • Beckers Hospital Review reports,
    • “Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine reported an operating income of $238.5 million (2.4% margin) for the nine months ended March 31, up 46.3% from $163 million (1.9% margin) in the same period last year, according to financial documents filed May 20.
    • “The results follow the April 1, 2025, acquisition of Doylestown (Pa.) Health. Doylestown Hospital, a 245-bed teaching hospital, became Penn Medicine’s seventh hospital and is now known as Penn Medicine Doylestown Health.”
  • STAT News tells us,
    • “Retro Biosciences, the longevity startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has raised more money at a $1.8 billion valuation, it announced Friday. 
    • “Retro has a big mission: Add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan. It is seeking to do that by using a variety of technologies, including in vivo gene therapies, cell replacement therapies, and other approaches to spur younger, healthier cells into aging tissues.
    • “The company is currently running its first clinical trial — testing a pill designed to enhance the body’s ability to better clear out protein aggregates in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Retro CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix told the audience at STAT’s Breakthrough Summit West on Tuesday that the trial is going “super good” and that researchers haven’t seen any dose-limiting toxicities. He said he anticipates releasing some data from the trial around August.”  
  • Fierce Healthcare informs us,
    • “Innovaccer acquired CaduceusHealth to combine its AI platform with the company’s revenue cycle management services and staff to serve ambulatory care providers.
    • ‘Innovaccer, founded in 2014, built software solutions to unify enterprise data and applies AI to automate manual tasks and streamline workflows for payers and providers. Last year, it rolled out Flow Auth, an AI-powered prior authorization solution that is part of Flow by Innovaccer, an AI-powered revenue cycle suite designed to modernize financial operations for health systems. Other capabilities include Flow Capture, an autonomous medical coding solution and Flow Collect, an AI-powered denial management and revenue recovery tool.
    • “Innovaccer claims that it now serves over 200 health systems and payers, 95% of community pharmacies and 80 million patient lives across the United States. Flow is built on Gravity, Innovaccer’s healthcare AI infrastructure platform.”
  • and
    • “Eugene, Ore.-based Ksana Health is undertaking a multi-institutional research effort aimed at creating a new class of artificial intelligence to advance mental health and substance use disorder treatment and prevention.
    • “The software company was awarded a $17.9 million contract by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a Large Health Behavior Model (LHBM). Its goal is to train AI models on smartphones and other wearables data, including sleep, mobility and language use linked to large scale electronic health records (EHRs).
    • “This initiative augments Ksana’s current efforts to shift behavioral healthcare from episodic, subjective assessment toward continuous, data-driven health promotion, reducing healthcare spending, improving quality of life, and reaching populations that currently lack access to effective behavioral health support,” said Tony Scripa, Ksana Health COO and project co-investigator, in a statement.”
  • and
    • “More than seven in 10 Medicare members report feeling confusion or uncertainty when navigating online health information, a new whitepaper from CVS Health found. 
    • “The research (PDF) drew insights from Medicare-eligible consumers through surveys, interviews and ethnographic studies. 
    • “Seventy-one percent of respondents report an eagerness to use more digital health care tools and 86% report an eagerness to use them. However, 58% of respondents report that low digital health literacy is negatively impacting their ability to manage their health. 
    • “We’re caring for the fastest-growing and most clinically complex population in the country, and what we found in the research challenges a common assumption—older adults actually are more open to engaging with technology than many think,” said Dr. Benjamin Kornitzer, M.D., Aetna senior vice president and CMO, in a statement. “It creates a real opportunity to meet them where they are and provide day-to-day support, whether it’s managing medications, following up after a visit, or staying on track with chronic conditions. Technology and engagement can help them live healthier, more independent lives.”
    • “As a result, CVS said it is applying insights from the research across its digital offerings, including clearer navigation, stronger accessibility features and added privacy and security transparency.”