Cybersecurity Dive

Generative AI

Cybersecurity Dive

David Ermer–Cybersecurity, Generative AI–

From the Iranian war front,

  • Industrial Cyber reports,
    • “Following its recent cybersecurity incident, medical technology giant Stryker said it found no indication of ransomware or malware. As the investigation progressed, alongside Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 and other experts, the company determined that the threat actor used a malicious file to execute commands, enabling them to conceal activity within its systems. The file was not capable of spreading, either within or outside the environment.
    • “Our internal teams continue to work around the clock with external partners to make meaningful progress on our restoration efforts. We are grateful for the partnership and collaboration with government agencies and industry partners,” Stryker wrote in its latest update. “We believe the incident is contained, and we are prioritizing restoration of systems that directly support customers, ordering and shipping. Our internal teams, in partnership with third-party experts, reacted quickly to not only regain access but to remove the unauthorized party from our environment.”
    • “The update noted that, most importantly, the investigation has not identified any malicious activity directed towards customers, suppliers, vendors, or partners.” * * *
    • “Resecurity warns that the Iran conflict has rapidly evolved into a multi-domain confrontation where kinetic military operations are tightly integrated with cyber, electronic, and information warfare, marking a shift in how modern conflicts unfold. The analysis highlights sustained missile and drone strikes occurring alongside coordinated cyber campaigns driven by state-linked actors and proxy groups targeting critical infrastructure, enterprises, and government systems. This convergence is expected to persist, with cyber operations increasingly used to disrupt services, gather intelligence, and amplify geopolitical impact, even as physical hostilities continue across the region.”
  • MedTech Dive adds,
    • “Stryker has restored most manufacturing sites and critical lines roughly two weeks after the company suffered a cyberattack.
    • “The company is working with its global manufacturing sites as “operations steadily improve towards full capacity,” a spokesperson said in a statement emailed to MedTech Dive. Stryker is making “strong progress” on restoring underlying systems that support production and fulfillment.
    • “Stryker’s electronic ordering system, which was shut down due to the attack, has been restored for customers. The Portage, Michigan-based company is “working as quickly and safely as possible to reconcile orders, manufacture products and deliver to our customers so they can continue to provide seamless patient care,” the spokesperson said.
    • “The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Stryker has a timeline for full restoration of its operations, and whether the financial and material impact on the company is yet known.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive relates,
    • “An Iran-linked ransomware group targeted an unnamed U.S. healthcare provider in the lead-up to the Iran war, according to a report Tuesday [March 24] from Halcyon. 
    • “Tracked under the name Pay2Key, the group gained access to a compromised administrative account for several days and then encrypted the account. 
    • “Forensics investigators, which included Halcyon and Beazley Security, found no evidence that data was stolen. This marks a departure from the group’s previous attacks. Researchers suggest the attacker may have changed tactics to focus more on destruction rather than pure extortion. 
    • “Also, the threat group appears to have shifted its attention toward the U.S. after historically targeting Israeli systems.” 

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “Members of Congress and their staffs are eagerly awaiting the Trump administration’s plan for implementing its new cybersecurity strategy and want more regular updates on how the government is helping critical infrastructure organizations guard against new Iran-linked hacking threats.
    • “Staffers from the House Homeland Security Committee and the House Oversight Committee discussed those and other cybersecurity issues during a panel at the RSAC 2026 Conference here on Tuesday [March 24].
    • “While the Democratic and Republican staffers sometimes took different approaches to the issues, they agreed on the need for more details about the strategy and about efforts to counter Iran-linked cyberattacks.”
  • and
    • “The program that underpins the entire global vulnerability-fixing ecosystem is in danger of either collapsing or fading into irrelevance without major changes, according to one of the program’s leaders.
    • “I don’t think we can afford to continue at the pace [and] with the tools that we currently have in order to make real progress. We’re just gonna be left in the dust,” Katie Noble, a board member for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program, said during a panel at the RSAC 2026 Conference here on Tuesday [March 24].” * * *
    • “Through a network of affiliated organizations, the CVE Program vets vulnerability reports and assigns each flaw a unique CVE number, which helps researchers, businesses, government agencies and information-sharing groups track the flaws and understand their impact. The program is widely considered a crown jewel of the cybersecurity community. But its fate is uncertain after the nonprofit MITRE Corporation, which runs the program, almost lost crucial federal funding last year.
    • “On top of those logistical woes, the broader CVE ecosystem is also reeling from the dramatic AI-powered increase in the number of vulnerability reports flowing into software vendors and open-source platforms.”
  • Cyberscoop adds,
    • “Four former National Security Agency directors shared varying concerns about a lack of earnest and widespread response to growing threats in cyberspace during a discussion at the RSAC 2026 Conference on Tuesday.
    • “Accelerating threats posed by artificial intelligence, China and cybercriminals at large are testing the country’s resolve and determination to foster meaningful public-private collaboration, the former commanders of U.S. Cyber Command said. 
    • “While the four-star military officials remain confident in the country’s resources and people committed to defending the nation from cyberattacks, they voiced unease about challenges that could upend technological dominance and diminish a collective response to serious intrusions. 
    • “I think we’ve become numb to it,” retired Gen. Paul Nakasone said. “We continue to see these different intrusions, and intrusions have gotten to a size that the scale is just incredible to me.”
  • and
    • “A year-long effort to strengthen cybersecurity and modernize tech at U.S. intelligence agencies has led to policy standards for using AI to bolster cyber defenses, a shared repository of all apps that have undergone a cybersecurity review and more, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Thursday [March 26].
    • “An unclassified summary of cyber and tech modernization work under the first year of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s stewardship states that the office has expanded the automation of threat hunting across intelligence community networks. (The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency conducts threat hunting across federal civilian agencies.)
    • The ODNI also has developed a zero-trust strategy that shifts “to a data-centric security model that protects information regardless of location or network,” according to the summary.
    • “Over the past year, we have taken meaningful steps to begin fulfilling that responsibility through the largest IC-wide technology investment and modernization effort in history,” Gabbard said in a news release. “President Trump’s Intelligence Community is moving faster and more decisively on cybersecurity modernization and investments in IT than ever before, delivering stronger defenses, greater efficiency, and real cost savings for the American people.”   
  • Tech Target shares a boatload of other insights from the RSAC conference.
  • Federal News Network tells us,
    • “The Trump administration is prioritizing ensuring the government leads on adopting artificial intelligence for cyber defense, according to a top Office of Management and Budget official.
    • “The use of “AI-enabled cyber tools” is specifically called out in the new national cybersecurity strategy. The White House’s top cyber official has said the administration will launch a series of pilot programs to harden government networks under the new strategy.
    • White House officials in recent weeks convened a roundtable featuring “representatives from industry as well as agencies who are at the cutting edge of cyber defense, to talk about how we can really operationalize AI for cyber defense,” Nick Polk, branch director for cybersecurity within OMB’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, said during a Thursday webinar hosted by the Digital Government Institute.
    • “This is something where we have really decided that we want to take the mantle and have the government lead in this space,” Polk added.”
  • and
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after a year of workforce reductions that has left CISA’s ranks depleted, is planning to recruit more than 300 people in the coming months.
    • “The cyber agency is also loosening restrictions around flexible work schedules for its employees.
    • “Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen announced those plans in a March 23 email to staff. Andersen said Department of Homeland Security headquarters had approved CISA’s “critical hire list,” including 329 “mission critical hires” throughout the agency.
    • “During the ongoing government shutdown, CISA will only be hiring for “excepted” positions, Andersen added. Roughly two-thirds of CISA’s staff is currently furloughed due to the DHS shutdown.“
  • Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
    • “The Federal Communications Commission on Monday said it will no longer approve imported routers for consumer use without government review. 
    • “An interagency body convened by the White House determined that consumer-grade routers made outside the U.S. present an unacceptable risk to national security, according to FCC officials. 
    • “The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy says the U.S. should not be dependent on an outside power for core components considered vital to the nation’s economy or defense.”
  • Cyberscoop points out,
    • “An operation to crack down on the widely used RedLine infostealer has netted the extradition of an Armenian man to the United States, where he made an initial appearance in a Texas court Wednesday.
    • “Authorities charged Hambardzum Minasyan with conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering for his alleged role with RedLine. Infostealers thieve billions of user credentials such as passwords annually.”
  • Security Week adds,
    • “Russian cybercriminal Ilya Angelov, known online as ‘Milan’ and ‘Okart’, has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for his role in the administration of a botnet used to facilitate ransomware attacks, the DOJ announced on Tuesday [March 24].
    • “According to the DOJ, Angelov was part of a threat group tracked by the FBI as Mario Kart, and by the cybersecurity community as TA-551, Shathak, Gold Cabin, Monster Libra, G0127, and ATK236.
    • “The charges against Angelov stem from activities he engaged in between 2017 and 2021, during which his cybercrime group built a botnet by distributing malware via spam email attachments.” * * *
    • “Angelov’s sentencing comes shortly after the DOJ announced that another Russian national, Aleksei Volkov, has been sentenced to 81 months in prison for his role in ransomware attacks.” 
  • The Wall Street Journal notes,
    • “Global hackers are getting better at drawing lessons from online crime busts to build more resilient operations, posing a dilemma for law-enforcement officials.
    • “The problem, known as tactical exposure, is expected to deepen amid calls by the White House for more aggressive action against cybercrime and a recent wave of takedowns and disruptions of cybercrime networks and platforms.”

From the cybersecurity vulnerabilities and breaches front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “A sophisticated China-nexus threat actor has embedded digital sleeper cells into the networks of telecom firms in multiple countries, according to a report released Thursday from cybersecurity firm Rapid7.
    • “The adversary, tracked as Red Menshen, has used a stealthy, Linux-based implant called BPFdoor that is designed to function within the operating system kernel.
    • “The goal is to run an espionage campaign against critical industry segments and government agencies, maintaining a long-term presence inside these networks, Rapid7 researchers said. ‘There are similarities to campaigns previously launched by other China-nexus actors, including Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, but the mechanisms have evolved and the strategic objectives of these attacks have a longer tail.”
  • and
    • “The evolving threat landscape has placed identity governance at the center of cybersecurity, according to a pair of reports released this week, meaning that organizations should prioritize identity management as a way to protect sprawling computer networks from under-the-radar intrusions.
    • “Cloudflare’s report, released Wednesday, and PwC’s report, released Tuesday, both emphasize the need for companies to do a better job of monitoring user behavior and scanning for suspicious network activity.
    • “The rise of AI only makes identity governance even more important, researchers wrote, as the technology helps hackers improve their impersonation tactics.”
  • and
    • “Security researchers warn that a critical vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler products might lead to a wave of exploitation that could rival the 2023 CitrixBleed crisis. 
    • “Citrix on Monday [March 23] disclosed an insufficient input validation flaw in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway application-delivery products, tracked as CVE-2026-3055, with a severity score of 9.3. 
    • “Citrix also disclosed a race condition flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-4368, in the same products. That vulnerability has a severity score of 7.7.
    • “The input validation flaw can allow an attacker to leak sensitive information, similar to the original CitrixBleed flaw, which led to a wave of high profile data theft and ransomware attacks. 
    • “NetScalers are critical solutions that have been continuously targeted for initial access into enterprise environments,” Benjamin Harris, founder and CEO of watchTowr, told Cybersecurity Dive.”
  • Cyberscoop relates,
    • “Researchers and threat hunters are scrambling to contain a maximum-severity defect in Ubiquiti’s UniFi Network Application that attackers could exploit to take over user accounts by accessing and manipulating files.
    • “The path-traversal vulnerability — CVE-2026-22557 — affects software used to manage UniFi networking devices, including access points, gateways and switches. The vendor disclosed and released patches for the defect in a security advisory Wednesday [March 25].
    • “As of this morning, we have not observed any public proof-of-concept exploits or confirmed reports of exploitation in the wild,” Matthew Guidry, senior product detection engineer at Censys, told CyberScoop.
    • “However, because this is a path-traversal vulnerability, the technical complexity for an attacker is typically lower than memory-corruption or buffer-overflow bugs,” he added. “Given that the CVSS 10 rating implies low attack complexity, we anticipate that once the specific vulnerable endpoint is identified, exploitation will be trivial to automate.”

From the ransomware front,

  • The Bangor Daily News reports,
    • “The Maine mental health agency AMHC was the subject of a ransomware attack this month allegedly perpetrated by a Russia-based cybercrime group. 
    • “Qilin, which analysts have cited as the world’s leading ransomware threat, added the Presque Isle-based healthcare organization to a list of victims on its dark web data leak site Tuesday, according to screenshots and reports posted by more than a dozen websites and groups that track ransomware. 
    • “AMHC is the largest behavioral healthcare provider for a large swath of rural Maine, operating in Aroostook, Hancock and Washington counties. It has more than 350 employees and over 5,500 clients between 27 service locations, according to its website. 
    • “The organization acknowledged the attack in a statement to the Bangor Daily News Wednesday, saying that it “recently experienced a network disruption,” and that it had partnered with “cyber incident specialists” to investigate.”
  • Dark Reading relates,
    • “Ransomware is not only growing, threat actors are also accelerating the pace of their attacks by using offensive tools to exploit valid credentials and hit targets with speed and precision. 
    • “The practice has undergone big changes over the past five years. Initially, attacks focused on encrypting data; now, threat actors threaten to extract it to pressure victims into paying. Double-extortion tactics quickly shifted to triple-extortion threats to expose stolen data. Threat actors also transitioned from extorting companies to contacting victims directly — whatever it takes to rake in the cash.
    • “The latest shift is all about speed. Ransomware actors discovered methods to bypass endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, and they’re increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to steal data more quickly. 
    • “Halcyon’s 2026 Method Survey Report reveals that while 98% of organizations use EDR tools for ransomware defense, only 25% “actually trust it to defend against today’s evolving ransomware threat.” Additionally, 78% of surveyed participants say AI made ransomware attacks more effective. Conversely, only 6% believe the tools have improved their own defenses.”  
  • CSO adds,
    • “In 2025, attacker dwell time rose, voice phishing topped email phishing, and threat actors increasingly targeted backup and identity systems, according to Mandiant’s latest incident response data.
    • “Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026 report, released today at the RSA Conference, shows that attackers are moving faster, operating more collaboratively, and increasingly focusing on the systems organizations rely on to recover from breaches.
    • “The report, based on more than 500,000 hours of incident response engagements in 2025, finds that attackers are compressing key phases of the attack lifecycle, even as median dwell time increased to 14 days, up from 11 days the previous year.
    • “In addition, it reveals a change in tactics. Voice phishing accounted for 11% of initial infection vectors, making it the second most common entry point after exploits, which led at 32%. Email phishing declined to 6%, down from 14% the year before, reflecting a move toward more interactive social engineering. Together, the trends point to a shift in both how quickly attacks unfold and what attackers are trying to achieve once inside.”
  • Tech Radar explains why stolen credentials continue to work even when multi-factor authentication is in place.
  • Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
    • “Businesses need to think carefully about when they publicly blame a threat actor for a cyberattack, lest they invite unwanted consequences, experts said at a panel at the RSAC 2026 Conference here on Tuesday.
    • “The rush to attribute is a risky one,” Megan Stifel, the chief strategy officer at the Institute for Security and Technology, a cybersecurity think tank, said during a panel discussion.
    • “Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and senior adviser at FTI Consulting who advises cyberattack victims, called attribution “extremely risky” because “you are bringing third parties into the discussion, and those third parties may very well respond.”

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

  • Cyberscoop reports,
    • “Google is accelerating its timeline for migrating its products to quantum resistant encryption to 2029, the latest sign that tech leaders are worried that they haven’t been aggressive enough in planning for a post-quantum future.
    • “In a blog posted Wednesday [March 25], vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins and senior staff cryptology engineer Sophie Schmieg said that Google and other tech companies have observed faster than expected advances in several quantum fields.
    • “This new timeline reflects migration needs for the PQC era in light of progress on quantum computing hardware development, quantum error correction, and quantum factoring resource estimates,” Adkins and Schmieg wrote.
    • “Google is replacing outdated encryption across their devices, systems and data with new algorithms vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Those algorithms, developed over a decade by NIST and independent cryptologists, are designed to protect against future attacks from quantum computers.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive relates,
    • “Businesses hoping AI can automate away their security woes should think again, because the technology isn’t a cure-all and is actually introducing new risks, experts warned at the RSAC 2026 Conference here.
    • “We’re seeing advantages [with AI for defense], but we’re also seeing a lot of hiccups as we figure out how to get there,” Adam Pennington, who oversees MITRE’s ATT&CK framework, said during a panel about how AI is changing the push-and-pull between attackers and defenders.
    • “Security teams are using AI in a lot of the same ways as hackers, Pennington said, especially rapid code-writing. “There does need to be some caution, though, in using it directly in defense,” he said. “False positives have always been a problem in trying to apply machine learning and AI to defense.”
    • “The warnings from Pennington and others on the panel come as businesses rush to purchase AI security services, often with seemingly little regard for their efficacy or tradeoffs.”
  • Dark Reading adds,
    • “Organizations may want to think twice before consulting with AI models on software dependency decisions.
    • “New research from Sonatype found that “frontier” models (defined as the most advanced AI models available at a given moment) often generate faulty or fabricated recommendations for software dependencies, which spells trouble for organizations that lean on AI for upgrade and patching guidance. 
    • “Sonatype’s research team analyzed 36,870 unique dependency upgrade recommendations across Maven Central, npm, PyPI, and NuGet between June and August 2025. In all, the DevSecOps company studied a total of 258,000 recommendations generated by seven AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.”
  • Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

Weekend Update

David Ermer–Congress, FDA, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, OPM, Patient safety, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC

  • The FEHBlog noticed the following noteworthy hearing scheduled for Wednesday, March 25:
    • House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government
    • 10:00 AM Local Time | 2359 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C.
    • Hearing: Oversight Hearing – U.S. Office of Personnel Management
    • Witnesses: The Honorable Scott Kupor.
    • Meeting Details
  • Per a Federal Trade Commission news release,
    • “Today, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson directed FTC staff to form a Healthcare Task Force that will engage in a coordinated, integrated approach to healthcare enforcement and advocacy to protect American patients, healthcare workers, and taxpayers.
    • “In a memorandum, Chairman Ferguson directed the FTC’s Bureaus of Competition, Consumer Protection and Economics, as well as the Office of Policy Planning and Office of Technology to form the Healthcare Task Force.
    • “The Healthcare Task Force will:
      • “Lead targeted enforcement and advocacy initiatives focused on key priorities;
      • “Devise coordinated agencywide strategies on investigations;
      • “Take a proactive and strategic approach to identifying amicus and statement of interest opportunities; and
      • “Identify emerging issues and new priority areas for enforcement and advocacy.”
  • The American Hospital Association News tells us,
    • “The White House today [March 20] released its national policy framework on artificial intelligence. The framework includes several recommendations for Congress, including establishing regulatory sandboxes to foster AI application development, providing resources to make federal data accessible to industry, and a proposal to not create new federal rulemaking bodies to regulate AI. It urges Congress to support the development and deployment of sector-specific AI applications through existing regulatory mechanisms.  
    • “Additionally, the framework includes workforce-specific recommendations for Congress, such as expanding federal efforts to study trends in task realignment driven by AI to inform future workforce policies. Finally, the framework also calls for Congress to establish policies to preempt state laws that impose undue burden but not preempt otherwise lawful state regulations related to child safety, zoning for data centers and state government procurement of AI.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • MSN informs us,
    • “Organic spinach, both bulk and cut, has been recalled nationwide after testing found listeria.
    • “Sno Pac Foods recalled Sno Pac Organic Frozen Cut Spinach in 10-ounce bags and Del Mar Bulk Organic Frozen Spinach in 35-pound boxes the day after Sno Pac spinach in HelloFresh meals triggered a public health alert.”
  • Health Day reports,
    • “A long-debated plan to block teens from using tanning beds nationwide will not move forward.
    • ‘The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said earlier this week it is withdrawing a proposed rule that would have banned anyone under age 18 from using tanning beds.
    • “The rule, first proposed in 2015, would have also required adults to sign a waiver acknowledging risks like skin cancer and severe burns before using tanning devices.
    • “Without a federal rule, regulations will continue to vary by state. Some states, including California, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas and Minnesota as well as Washington, D.C., already bar minors from using tanning beds.
    • “Other states allow teens to use them with the consent of a parent.
    • “The FDA stressed that the “withdrawal of the proposed restrictions does not mean that exposure to UV radiation does not cause skin cancer.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • Health Day reports,
    • “High blood pressure is taking a growing toll on younger women, a new study warns.
    • “Researchers say deaths from heart disease linked to hypertension are rising among women ages 25 to 44.
    • ‘The rate has more than quadrupled over the past two decades — from about one to nearly five per 100-thousand women – according to their analysis.
    • “What’s behind the increase? One author points to an  underestimated cardiovascular risk, delayed diagnosis and missed chances for early treatment.
    • ‘She says, “Even though hypertension is more prevalent in older populations, it’s something that we need to be vigilant about in younger populations, as well.”
  • MedPage Today suggests, “To Limit Antibiotic Overprescribing, Take a Page from the Opioid Epidemic — Both drugs are dangerous when misused.
    • “The following strategies may help reduce inappropriate prescribing:
      • “Prescription drug monitoring programs. Statewide programs to monitor opioid prescriptions are credited with curbing prescribing rates. While these programs are intended to provide clinicians with patients’ medication histories, they can also be used to identify outlier over-prescribers, and artificial intelligence can be used to quickly analyze large prescribing datasets and recognize patterns of overuse.
      • “Prescriber education and feedback. Institutional programs focused on individual prescriber education and feedback can reduce both opioid and antibiotic prescribing. Since 2019, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has required hospitals to implement inpatient antimicrobial stewardship programs, which monitor antibiotic prescription and promote appropriate use. Similar requirements do not yet exist for outpatient settings, where most antibiotic prescribing occurs, and expanding outpatient stewardship efforts could substantially reduce overuse.
      • “Published treatment guidelines. In 2016, the CDC released evidence-based guidelines for the use of opioids for chronic pain, which helped reduce opioid use by encouraging lower doses, shorter durations, and non-opioid alternatives. While guidelines for antibiotic prescribing do exist, more definitive recommendations for avoiding antibiotics in patients with a low likelihood of bacterial infection could help promote more judicious prescribing.
      • “Public education campaigns. Campaigns to educate the public on the harms of antibiotic misuse would reduce the demand for these medicines, just as growing awareness of the dangers of opioids has prompted some patients to ask for alternative options for pain relief.”
  • The New York Times lets us know four things opthamologists wish you knew about your eyes.
    • “Your eyes can get sunburned.”
    • “Contacts should not be worn while swimming or sleeping.”
    • “Staring at your screen can cause dry eyes.”
    • “An eye exam can reveal a wide range of diseases.”
  • Health Day notes,
    • “Got something important you don’t dare forget — like taking your heart medication, turning off the stove or a big date? 
    • “Here’s some friendly advice from Carrie Cuttler, a researcher at Washington State University in Pullman.
      • “You probably don’t want to be high at the time you need to remember to do it,” said Cuttler, an associate professor of psychology and co-author of a new study looking at what cannabis does to your memory.
      • “In a study of 120 regular cannabis users, she and her colleague Ryan McLaughlin found that smoking weed disrupted multiple memory systems at the same time. 
      • “In fact, they reported, THC, the chemical in cannabis that makes you high, may do even more than make you a tad forgetful. It can even create new memories — of things that never happened.”
    • “The findings were recently published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
    • “The research suggests that cannabis affects not only simple recall — like remembering a list of words — but kinds of memories people rely on to get through the day.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Healthcare Dive reports,
    • “Providence is exploring a potential sale of its health plan, citing the higher spending that’s swamping insurers.
    • “The news disclosed on Thursday [March 19] comes as the Catholic nonprofit system continues to pursue a financial turnaround plan that’s included layoffs and hospital sales.
    • “Providence declined to comment on potential acquirers or timing of a deal, and said it will provide updates as decisions are made.”
    • “Providence said its decision to consider a sale of Providence Health Plan isn’t due to the plan’s quality, but its struggle as a smaller regional insurer to overcome challenges like rising costs and technology investments that are easier for its larger peers.
    • “PHP covers hundreds of thousands of members, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, across employer, commercial Medicare, Medicare Advantage, managed Medicaid and Affordable Care Act plans.”
  • BioPharma Dive relates
    • “Earendil Labs, a high-powered startup with a presence in China and the U.S., has secured $787 million to advance a sprawling pipeline of biologic medicines for autoimmune conditions and cancer. 
    • “The hefty funding announced by the biotechnology company on Friday included more than half a dozen investors, among them venture firms Dimension and Luminous Ventures and the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. That bankroll “allows us to operate at a fundamentally different scale,” enabling the company to advance several programs towards clinical testing while building an “R&D organization designed for long-term impact,” founder and CEO Jian Peng said in a statement.”
    • “The company is using artificial intelligence to develop next-generation biologics for several different diseases, from asthma and eczema to colorectal cancer. Earendil claims its technology has produced more than 40 programs overall, and on its website lists 19 in its pipeline. One, for inflammatory bowel disease, is ready for Phase 2 development, the company said Friday.”

Notable Death

  • The Washington Post reports,
    • “J. Michael Bishop, a microbiologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1989 for research that illuminated the genetic roots of cancer, and who later served as chancellor of the University of California at San Francisco, died March 20 at a hospital in San Francisco. He was 90.
    • ‘The cause was pneumonia, said his son Eliot Bishop.”
  • RIP

Cybersecurity Saturday

David Ermer–Cybersecurity, Generative AI–

From the Iranian War front,

  • The Wall Street Journal reminds us,
    • “Iran pulled off likely the most significant wartime cyberattack against the U.S. in history, leveraging its hacking powers to cause major disruptions at a global medical-equipment firm that struggled to bring itself back online in recent days.
    • “The attack brought a conflict that until now had been largely confined to the Gulf region to the American homeland and offered a preview of the potential for how Iran may broaden its response to the U.S. and Israeli military campaign.
    • “Stryker, the Michigan-based firm hit in the hack, said it experienced “global disruption” and quickly contained it. The company said it believed the incident had been limited to its internal Microsoft systems. The company added that some hospitals may be experiencing temporary pauses in transmissions of medical data, but that its connected products “are not impacted and are safe to use.” Microsoft hasn’t commented on the hack.”
  • The American Hospital Association News adds,
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [CISA] March 18 released an alert urging U.S. organizations to harden their endpoint management systems following the March 11 cyberattack against Stryker, a U.S.-based medical technology and supply firm. The attack impacted the company’s Microsoft environment, and Stryker said there was no indication of ransomware or malware. The CISA alert provides various recommendations and resources, as well as best practices for securing Microsoft Intune.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
    • “The Department of Justice on Thursday [March 19] said four domains used for Iranian-backed hacking and intimidation of political opponents have been taken down in a court-ordered operation. 
    • “Two of the domains were connected to Handala, the state-linked threat group that authorities confirmed was behind the hack of Stryker, a Michigan-based medical technology giant. 
    • “A partially redacted FBI affidavit did not specifically identify Stryker by name, but the details of the attack match with the circumstances of the same incident.” * * *
    • “The sites were part of a larger effort by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) to intimidate dissidents, conduct malicious attacks, target Israelis and conduct violent attacks against journalists, according to court records. 
    • “Federal authorities obtained a seizure warrant Thursday, according to the FBI affidavit filed Thursday at U.S. District Court in Maryland.
    • “The FBI seizure is not expected to have a major impact on Handala’s ability to conduct attacks, said the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).”  
  • Bleeping Computer offers “a five-step playbook to stop Iranian wiper campaigns before they spread.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

  • Politico reports,
    • “The White House offered additional immigration enforcement concessions to Democrats Friday evening [March 20] as border czar Tom Homan met a second time with a bipartisan group of senators seeking to end the Homeland Security shutdown, according to lawmakers who attended.
    • “Leaving the private meeting, Republican senators said they hope Democrats respond over the weekend to the Trump administration’s bolstered proposal of immigration enforcement changes meant to address Democratic demands for funding DHS.”
  • The Wall Street Journal adds,
    • “March 27 is a make-or-break day for TSA officers.
    • “If Congress leaves that day for a scheduled two-week recess without reaching a deal to fund the Transportation Security Administration, officers are set to miss more than a month of paychecks.” 
  • Cybersecurity Dive lets us know,
    • “The Trump administration will make sure that new AI technologies are secure by design, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday. [March 17]
    • “What we are working for in my lane is to ensure that the technical security is not seen as a barrier to that innovation, but is seen as a fundamental piece of the ability to scale it and move it as quickly as possible,” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said at an event hosted by the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security.”
    • “Cairncross addressed the audience in Washington two weeks after the Trump administration released its cybersecurity strategy, a short, high-level document that discussed critical infrastructure protection, emerging technologies and digital deterrence. Cairncross said the government wanted to work closely with the U.S. companies that operate important online infrastructure, including to counter foreign adversaries — but he stressed that the government would be the one conducting offensive operations.”
  • Per a March 12 FBI news release,
    • “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is publishing this Public Service Announcement (PSA) to raise awareness of residential proxies, the risks they pose, and steps the public can take to safeguard their devices from becoming part of a residential proxy network. Cyber threat actors use residential proxies to facilitate illicit activities, while obfuscating their true identities and locations by routing internet traffic through home and small business internet networks.”
  • Per a NIST news release,
    • “The Domain Name System (DNS) plays an integral role in every organization’s security posture by translating domain names into IP addresses. It can serve as an enforcement point for enterprise security policy and an indicator of potential malicious activity on a network. A disruption or attack against the DNS can impact an entire organization.
    • “NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-81r3 (Revision 3), Secure Domain Name System (DNS) Deployment Guide, describes the different roles of DNS and gives recommendations for protecting the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of DNS services, including:
      • “The role DNS plays in supporting a zero trust architecture, such as serving as both a policy enforcement point (PEP) and a source of information when evaluating access requests
      • “The role of hosting DNS information (authoritative DNS), including guidance on protecting the integrity and authenticity of DNS information using DNSSEC
      • “The role of recursive DNS, including guidance on protecting the confidentiality of client DNS queries.”
  • Cyberscoop reports,
    • “Three American men were sentenced Friday [March 20] for crimes they committed in furtherance of North Korea’s vast scheme to get operatives hired at U.S. companies, the Justice Department said.
    • “The trio — Audricus Phagnasay, 25, Jason Salazar, 30, and Alexander Paul Travis, 35 — pleaded guilty in November to wire fraud conspiracy for providing U.S. identities to remote North Korean IT workers.”
  • and
    • “A 27-year-old North Carolina man was found guilty of six counts of extortion for a series of crimes he committed while working as a data analyst contractor for a D.C.-based international technology company, the Justice Department said Thursday [March 19].
    • “Cameron Nicholas Curry, also known as “Loot,” stole a trove of corporate data, including sensitive employee and compensation information, which he used to extort his employer, according to court records. Curry ultimately made off with approximately $2.5 million from the victim organization in January 2024.
    • “The insider attack underscores immeasurable risks companies accept when employees, or contractors placed in roles by a third-party recruitment company, as was the case with Curry, are allowed to access sensitive data on a company-owned laptop. Officials did not name the company.”
  • and
    • “Authorities seized infrastructure powering four botnets that hijacked a combined three million devices and launched more than 300,000 DDoS attacks collectively, the Justice Department said Thursday [March 19].
    • The botnets — Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid and Mossad — enabled operators to sell access to the infected devices for various cybercrimes. The aftermath spanned thousands of attacks, including some demanding extortion payments from victims, officials said.

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

  • Cyberscoop reports,
    • “Russian intelligence-affiliated hackers have gained access to thousands of users’ messaging apps with a global phishing campaign, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned in a public service announcement on Friday [March 20].
    • “The high-value targets they’re pursuing include current and former U.S. government officials, political figures, military personnel and journalists, the two agencies said in the joint PSA about the hackers’ attempts to infiltrate commercial messaging applications (CMAs).
    • “The U.S. alert comes on the heels of an earlier warning from Dutch authorities, who said last week that Russian hackers were “engaged in a large-scale global attempt” to take over WhatsApp and Signal accounts. The Dutch warning likewise followed a similar warning from Germany in February.
    • “The U.S. agencies emphasized that the hackers had not been able to bypass end-to-end encryption, instead manipulating users into giving up access. The scheme involves hackers posing as Signal help personnel, then inviting them to click a link or provide verification codes or account personal identification number.”
  • and
    • “Researchers and threat hunters are scrambling to contain a maximum-severity defect in Ubiquiti’s UniFi Network Application that attackers could exploit to take over user accounts by accessing and manipulating files.
    • “The path-traversal vulnerability — CVE-2026-22557 — affects software used to manage UniFi networking devices, including access points, gateways and switches. The vendor disclosed and released patches for the defect in a security advisory Wednesday.
    • “As of this morning, we have not observed any public proof-of-concept exploits or confirmed reports of exploitation in the wild,” Matthew Guidry, senior product detection engineer at Censys, told CyberScoop.
    • “However, because this is a path-traversal vulnerability, the technical complexity for an attacker is typically lower than memory-corruption or buffer-overflow bugs,” he added. “Given that the CVSS 10 rating implies low attack complexity, we anticipate that once the specific vulnerable endpoint is identified, exploitation will be trivial to automate.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “North Korea’s remote IT worker schemes rely heavily on Western collaborators, an elaborate hierarchy of roles and the extensive use of an open-source messaging application, IBM and the cybersecurity vendor Flare said in a report published on Wednesday.
    • “The new research details the tactics and technologies that North Korean operatives use to trick companies into hiring them and fly under the radar while they funnel their salaries to Pyongyang.
    • “Flare and IBM said the report could help businesses improve their ability to root out North Korean operatives posing as legitimate employees.”
  • and
    • “Threat groups are increasingly targeting critical infrastructure for malicious attacks by using direct access to cyber-physical systems, according to a report released Wednesday by Claroty, a firm that specializes in industrial security. 
    • “These attackers, which often are state-sponsored or hacktivist groups, are abusing virtual network protocol in a majority of cases to gain remote access to exposed internet-facing assets. 
    • “In two-thirds of the tracked incidents, attackers are compromising human-machine interfaces or supervisory control and data acquisition systems, which are used to control various industrial processes in factories and other operational technology environments.” 

From the ransomware front,

  • The Record reports on March 17,
    • “A prominent ransomware gang has taken credit for a devastating attack on the biggest hospital in Mississippi and a large county in New Jersey. 
    • “The Medusa ransomware operation, which experts believe is run out of Russia, said recently it was behind the cyberattack on the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC).” * * *
    • “The hospital fully reopened on March 2, and the Medusa ransomware gang claimed the attack last Thursday, demanding an $800,000 ransom. The hackers threatened to leak data stolen from the hospital by March 20.  
    • “A UMMC spokesperson declined to comment on the ransom threat.   
    • “Experts believe the Medusa operation is based in Russia due to its avoidance of targets in Commonwealth of Independent States, its Russian-language forum activity and the use of Cyrillic script in operational tools.” 
  • Cyberscoop adds,
    • “Ransomware remains a scourge that shows some signs of relenting, but incident responders and threat hunters are busier than ever as more financially-motivated attackers lean exclusively on data theft for extortion.
    • “Attacks that only involve data theft for extortion may not be more prevalent than traditional ransomware when attackers encrypt systems, but momentum is moving in that direction, Genevieve Stark, head of cybercrime intelligence at Google Threat Intelligence Group, told CyberScoop.
    • “When you look at the actors in the English-speaking underground, those actors are almost all just focusing on data-theft extortion right now,” Stark added. This includes groups like Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, Clop and other groups that have been responsible for some of the largest and farthest-reaching attacks over the past few years.
    • “Google Threat Intelligence Group’s research report on ransomware, which it shared exclusively and discussed with CyberScoop prior to release, underscores how the evolution and spread of cybercrime can cloud a collective understanding of ransomware, or attacks that use malware to encrypt or lock systems.” 
  • eSecurity Planet explains,
    • “Why BYOD Is the Favored Ransomware Backdoor.
    • “80% of ransomware attacks come from unmanaged devices. Explore how BYOD could be ransomware’s favored method and how to protect against attacks.”
  • and
    • “Ransomware’s Opening Play: Target Identity First
    • “Ransomware attackers now target identity systems like Active Directory first. Learn how identity resilience can help you prevent and recover from attacks.”

From the cybersecurity defenses front,

  • Cyberscoop asks,
    • “Can Zero Trust survive the AI era?
    • “As AI increases the speed of cyber attacks, governments and businesses must weigh the tradeoffs that come with deploying semi-autonomous AI agents to stop them.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive adds,
    • “Corporate cybersecurity leaders believe AI will be essential to their missions, but, so far, few are seeing big gains from agentic security products, according to a new EY survey.
    • “With AI governance dominating C-suite agendas, the survey released on Thursday found that companies are making progress in integrating risk management frameworks into their operations, even if those ways of thinking have yet to fully permeate corporate cultures.
    • “The survey findings prompted EY to make four high-level recommendations to businesses still deciding how to adopt and use AI for cybersecurity.”
  • The ISACA Blog considers,
    • “A report by the Neuro-rights Foundation examined the privacy practices of around 30 compelling consumer neuro-technology companies and found that more than 90% relied on vague safeguarding language with no concrete protection of consumers’ neural data. Researchers at Bitbrainreported the possibility of neural signals being captured by attackers using man in the middle attacks, with modified information being readily re-injected since applications do not check the devices they are connected to.
    • “The enterprise security perimeter has now moved beyond networks and terminals into the brain itself as thoughts become potential attack vectors.”
  • Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

Friday report

David Ermer–CDC, CMS, Congress, COVID-19, FDA, Generative AI, HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules, Medical / Rx research, Medicare, Mental health care, No Surprises Act, U.S. Healthcare–

Happy first day of Spring!!

From Washington, DC

  • Roll Call reports,
    • “Senators are sticking around Washington this weekend after a busy week on the Hill highlighted partisan divides, intraparty friction and growing tension between the two chambers. One thing is clear — everyone is ready for spring break.
    • “The Senate has largely been wrapped up in an extended debate on the GOP’s marquee voter ID legislation, dubbed the SAVE America Act. Debate on the bill began Tuesday and is anticipated to extend through the weekend, at least. 
    • “We’re in through this weekend,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said on Fox News on Friday morning. “There will be a vote on this bill. We will find out where everybody stands.” * * *
    • “After Senate appropriators of both parties held a face-to-face meeting Thursday with White House “border czar” Tom Homan — some of the first signs of progress in weeks — Thune set a deadline of next week for resolving the DHS funding standoff.”
  • Bloomberg Law relates,
    • “The Trump administration’s Medicare chief said the version of the program run by private insurers doesn’t do enough to control costs, raising questions about how much the US will pay companies in a crucial upcoming rate update.
    • “Chris Klomp, a top health official at the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the private Medicare Advantage program “does not sufficiently have control of costs,” in remarks at a STAT conference in New York on Thursday.”
  • STAT News adds,
    • “President Trump’s Medicare director said Thursday his team is considering a policy that would automatically enroll Medicare beneficiaries into Medicare Advantage plans, a controversial idea that was touted in the conservative Project 2025 policy blueprint. 
    • “Chris Klomp said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is mulling the feasibility of models that would either automatically enroll beneficiaries into the private form of Medicare or accountable care organizations, such as those that participate in the Medicare Shared Savings Program. Individuals could still opt into a different insurance arrangement. Right now, people who don’t make a choice are covered by traditional Medicare.
    • “Would either of those, in my view, be superior to a default enrollment into a fee-for-service arrangement, where there’s not this long-term, secular relationship between the beneficiary, the patient, and their provider? Yes,” Klomp said. 
    • “He made the comments in an interview with STAT reporter Mario Aguilar on the sidelines of STAT’s Breakthrough Summit East in New York.”
  • Health Affairs Forefront tells us,
    • “The only truly clear and formally stated goal of the MFN [most favored nation drug pricing] policies is to lower the prices that Americans pay for drugs. How can we begin to evaluate the extent and impact of this kind of change?
    • “It is notoriously difficult to know, precisely, what most Americans “pay” for drugs. We have a complicated system of confidential manufacturer rebates and arrangements with pharmacy benefit managers that often tie out-of-pocket payments to “list” prices that may or may not actually be paid by anyone. People far smarter than I have made careers of shedding light on the cost of drugs in the US, and ultimately, it will be up to them to track whether any person or entity ends up paying less for drugs (and for which drugs) than prior to the policies’ enactment. Until then, Observatory members are watching developments in a few key areas that could influence the reach of MFN policies in the US.
    • “First, they are watching the relationship of the MFN policies to the employer-based insurance market, which covers 160 million people, or more than 50 percent of those with health insurance in the US. To date, MFN policies have been announced for Medicare and Medicaid recipients and for individuals who purchase drugs out of pocket on TrumpRx. But even at discounted prices available through TrumpRx, many drugs will remain too costly for consumers unless they can use the insurance for which they already pay premiums.
    • “The reach of the new, “lower” prices will be limited if there isn’t a mechanism for those with employer-sponsored insurance to access those prices. Part of such “access” includes having purchases through TrumpRx (or other direct-to-consumer platforms) count toward the deductibles and out of pocket maximums that characterize private coverage. Without explicit mechanisms to enable this kind of accounting—or federal or state mandates to require it—the purchase of drugs at the MFN prices will likely be unappealing to more than half of the US population, significantly diluting the policies’ effectiveness and reach. Further, if employer-sponsored health plans cannot access the MFN prices, then those lower prices cannot be reflected in their overall premiums, which consistently rise far faster than both general inflation and wage growth with escalating pharmaceutical costs being an important contributor.”
  • and
    • “As reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in supplemental tables and public use files, the volume of cases submitted into the [No Surprises Act Independent Dispute Resolution] IDR process continues to exceed all expectations and grew rapidly in the first six months of 2025. During that period, parties submitted 1.2 million new disputes to the IDR portal—more than double the volume of the first two quarters of 2024 when nearly 590,000 disputes were filed. This amounts to a total of 3.4 million disputes from 2022 through June 2025.
    • “And the number of disputes is only continuing to increase: Even more recent bi-monthly updates from CMS show that nearly 1.4 million cases were filed from July 2025 through December 2025. This has resulted in a whopping 4.8 million total cases through the end of 2025. As a reminder, federal officials expected approximately 17,000 disputes per year.” * * *
    • “Consistent with prior trends, providers continued to initiate (and win) the vast majority of disputes.” * * *
    • Four provider groups and provider representatives—mostly backed by private equity—initiated the majority of these disputes: HaloMD, Team Health, Radiology Partners, and SCP Health. HaloMD—a middleman organization that specializes in arbitration—initiated the most disputes, accounting for 17 percent of all disputes in the first quarter of 2025 and 22 percent of all disputes in the second quarter of 2025. For an organization that initiated a mere 1 percent of line-item claims in 2023, this is a rapid rise to prominence. The second most frequent initiator, Team Health, has long been a high-volume IDR participant and initiated 16 percent of all disputes in the first six months of 2025, a level that is consistent with prior years. Combined, the top four initiators accounted for more than half (56 percent) of disputes filed in the first two quarters of 2025.
    • Providers also won 88 percent of disputes—the highest provider win rate to date—as compared to 85 percent in 2024 and 81 percent in 2023. Radiology Partners prevailed most often, winning favorable IDR awards in 92 percent and 95 percent of its cases in the first two quarters of 2025, respectively. Team Health saw similar win rates of 94 percent across both quarters. HaloMD won slightly less often but still prevailed in 87 percent and 82 percent of its disputes in the first two quarters of 2025, respectively.
  • Per a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services news release,
    • “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has finalized the Administrative Simplification; Adoption of Standards for Health Care Claims Attachments Transactions and Electronic Signatures Final Rule (CMS-0053-F).
    • “This groundbreaking final rule establishes the first-ever Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-adopted standards for health care claims attachments, enabling the secure electronic exchange of health care claims-related supporting clinical documentation such as medical records, x-rays and imaging, clinical notes, telemedicine visit documentation and laboratory results.
    • “The rule also establishes requirements for electronic signatures to ensure health care claims attachment transactions are secure, authenticated, and compliant with federal standards.” * * *
    • “Health care providers and payers should begin preparing to implement the finalized standards. This final rule is effective on May 26, 2026. The compliance deadlines for all requirements in this rule are set for 24 months from the effective date of the final rule. Stakeholders are encouraged to review the rule and begin implementing the new standards promptly. The final rule can be viewed at: https://www.federalregister.gov/.” * * *
    • To view the final rule fact sheet, visit: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/administrative-simplification-adoption-standards-health-care-claims-attachments-transactions.
    • For more information, visit: https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/burden-reduction/administrative-simplification/hipaa/events-latest-news.
  • PCMA points out,
    • “The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) is urging the Labor Department to roll back a proposed rule aimed at boosting price transparency in pharmacy benefit management relationships now that Congress has passed industry reforms.”
  • Beckers Payer Issues informs us,
    • “Nine percent of people who had ACA Marketplace coverage in 2025 are now uninsured, with healthcare costs as a major reason many enrollees either switched Marketplace plans or dropped coverage, according to a KFF poll. 
    • “The KFF follow-up survey of Marketplace enrollees was conducted Feb. 12 to March 2 and included 1,117 U.S. adults who had Marketplace insurance in 2025. The sample was drawn entirely from respondents to KFF’s original 2025 Marketplace survey, which included 1,350 participants.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • MedPage Today reports,
    • “The FDA issued a safety communication today warning of a potential increased risk of seizures tied to certain medications used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
    • “The agency will require manufacturers of carbidopa/levodopa products to update their labels with clearer warnings, to better inform patients and clinicians of this risk. The revised prescribing information will specify that these medications can cause vitamin B6 deficiency and vitamin B6 deficiency-associated seizures.
    • “The warning also instructs healthcare professionals to assess baseline vitamin B6 levels before initiating carbidopa/levodopa therapy and to monitor these levels periodically during treatment, supplementing with vitamin B6 as needed.”
  • MedTech Dive adds,
    • “Intuitive Surgical has recalled stapler reload cartridges after receiving reports of four serious injuries and one death.
    • “The Food and Drug Administration communicated the recall in an early alert Wednesday, one week after Intuitive asked customers to quarantine and return all affected and unused reloads.
    • “An Intuitive spokesperson said in an email to MedTech Dive that the company is still investigating the root cause of rare reports of incomplete staple lines when using the recalled 8 mm SureForm gray reload cartridges.”
  • Fierce Pharma relates,
    • “Rhythm Pharmaceuticals is switching up the tempo for its melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R) agonist Imcivree. After its initial approval more than five years ago to treat certain patients with genetic-driven obesity, the drug is moving into a different and broader realm with an FDA nod for acquired hypothalamic obesity (HO). 
    • “Acquired HO, for which Imcivree is the first approved treatment, represents an “expanded thinking” on the weight-regulating MC4R pathway that Rhythm’s product targets, Chief Scientific Officer Alastair Garfield, Ph.D., explained in a recent interview with Fierce. 
    • “Until now, all of Imcivree’s approved uses have centered around specific genetic causes. HO, on the other hand, is a result of a hypothalamic injury such as a tumor or stroke that impairs the MC4R pathway and causes weight gain and insatiable hunger (hyperphagia).”
  • Per an FDA news release,
    • “As part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s continuous quality improvement efforts, the agency today published a Federal Register Notice seeking public comment on the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher pilot program. The agency also announced a public hearing on June 12, to allow stakeholders to present information and views about the program.
    • “The public hearing, consistent with 21 CFR § 15.1 et seq., will seek feedback about the program’s eligibility criteria, the voucher selection processes, sponsor responsibilities, pre-submission requirements, FDA review procedures, the role of the CNPV Review Council, and other aspects of program implementation.” * * *
    • “The June 12 public hearing will be held at the FDA’s White Oak Headquarters with both an in-person and virtual option for participation. The FDA panelists will include subject matter experts from the Office of the Commissioner, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and the Oncology Center of Excellence, as well as a presiding officer. Requests to speak are due by May 1. The FDA is also soliciting written comments until June 27. For more information about the hearing: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/commissioners-national-priority-voucher-cnpv-pilot-program-public-hearing-06122026.”

From the judicial front,

  • Fierce Healthcare reports,
    • “A federal judge has dealt a blow to the Trump administration’s push to restrict gender-affirming care for minors.
    • “Per the New York Times, Oregon [U.S.] District Court Judge Mustafa Kasubhai ruled Thursday that Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. overstepped his legal authority in issuing a declaration late last year that would bar hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to minors if they want to participate in Medicare and Medicaid.” * * *
    • “Restricting access to gender-affirming care for minors has been a key priority for the Trump administration, and NYT reports that legal experts believe Kasubhai’s decision will likely be appealed.”

From the public health, medical and Rx research front,

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today,
    • “RSV activity started later than expected in most regions of the United States, though illness is not more severe compared with recent seasons. This unusual timing means that higher levels of RSV activity may continue into April in many regions. Emergency department visits and hospitalizations for RSV are highest among infants and children less than 4 years old. Seasonal influenza activity remains elevated nationally but is decreasing in most areas of the country. COVID-19 activity is decreasing in most areas of the country.
    • “COVID-19
      • “COVID-19 activity is decreasing in most areas of the country.
    • “Influenza
      • “Overall seasonal influenza activity remains elevated nationally but is decreasing in most areas of the country. Influenza A activity continues to decrease while trends in influenza B activity vary by region.
      • “Additional information about current influenza activity can be found at: Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report | CDC
    • “RSV
      • “RSV activity started later than expected in most regions of the United States, though illness is not more severe compared with recent seasons. This unusual timing means that higher levels of RSV activity may continue into April in many regions. Emergency department visits and hospitalizations for RSV are highest among infants and children less than 4 years old.
    • Vaccination
      • “RSV is a leading cause of hospitalization among U.S. babies.
      • “To help keep babies safe from severe RSV, babies younger than 8 months of age should get protection in their first RSV season (which usually starts in the fall) in one of these ways:
        • “The pregnant mother gets the RSV vaccine during pregnancy, or
        • “The baby gets an RSV antibody (nirsevimab or clesrovimab) just before the start of the RSV season or soon after birth, if born during the season.
      • “A CDC report showed that these protections are working. During the 2024–25 RSV season, infant RSV hospitalization rates were reduced by up to half compared to rates during seasons before when RSV prevention products were available.
      • “Interim estimates for the 2025–26 seasonal influenza vaccine show getting the vaccine reduced the risk of flu-related doctor visits and hospitalizations, supporting CDC’s vaccination recommendations. For children and teenagers, the vaccine was 38%–41% effective at preventing doctor visits and 41% effective at avoiding hospitalizations for the flu. For adults aged 18 and older, it was 22%–34% effective at preventing doctor visits and 30% effective for preventing hospital stays. Read more here: MMWR.
      • “Talk to your doctor or trusted healthcare provider about what may be recommended for you and your family.”
  • The American Hospital Association News reports,
    • “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today that there are now 1,487 confirmed measles cases nationwide so far this year. The CDC said 5% of cases have been hospitalized, and no deaths have been reported. The vaccination status of 92% of cases is unvaccinated or unknown. The South Carolina measles outbreak, which began in October 2025 and is currently the largest outbreak of any state, is at 997 cases. Utah, which has the second-largest outbreak, is now at 443 cases.” 
  • Health Day points out,
    • “Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) is no more effective than traditional antidepressants (TADs) for treatment of major depression, according to a review published online March 19 in JAMA Psychiatry.” 
  • Medscape explains how “New Nanoparticles Can Destroy Undruggable Cancer Proteins.”
  • Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News informs us,
    • “Current schizophrenia (SZ) medications treat symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, but do little for cognitive symptoms, such as disorganized thinking or executive dysfunction. As a result, many patients are unable to work, rely on family for lifelong support, become homeless or, in some cases, experience suicidal thoughts and actions.
    • “A study in humans and mice, headed by a team at Northwestern University, has discovered a novel biomarker of schizophrenia that could also serve as a new drug candidate to treat cognitive symptoms of the disorder. Their research in a mouse model of schizophrenia showed that treatment with a synthetic protein, SEAD1, corrected overexcited brain circuits. “A lot of people with schizophrenia cannot integrate well into society because of these cognitive deficits,” said Peter Penzes, PhD, professor of neuroscience, pharmacology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Our discovery could solve these challenges by establishing the basis of a revolutionary and completely novel treatment strategy through a tandem biomarker-peptide therapeutic approach.”

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

  • BioPharma Dive reports,
    • “Novartis will pay $2 billion up front to acquire a drug that could improve upon existing treatments for patients with a particular form of breast cancer.
    • “Through a deal announced Friday, Novartis will purchase Pikavation Therapeutics, a subsidiary of privately held, Delaware-based Synnovation Therapeutics. The buyout hands Novartis an experimental pill called SNV4818, which targets tumors driven to growth by mutations to the PIK3CA gene. Alterations to this gene are implicated in a wide variety of cancers, including an estimated 40% of patients whose breast tumors are hormone-receptor positive, but don’t express the protein HER2, according to Novartis.”
  • Healthcare Innovation relates,
    • “Mary Bacaj, president of value-based care at Conifer Health Solutions, recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about misconceptions around preventive care. She argues [in the interview found in the article] that self-insured employers should take a multi-year approach to assessing ROI rather than taking a single-year snapshot.” Check it out.
  • Beckers Hospital Review identifies and discusses six healthcare systems which are innovating primary care models to expand care.
  • Kaufman Hall informs us,
    • “Healthcare bankruptcy filings decreased for a second consecutive year, according to a recent report from Gibbons Advisors. The report finds a 21% decline in bankruptcy filings year-over-year, with the bulk of the 45 filings in 2025 occurring in the first quarter. The bankruptcy activity appears to be tempering, adjusting to pre-pandemic trends. By sector, senior care and pharmaceuticals comprise about half of the bankruptcies, with hospitals only accounting for 13.6% of all healthcare bankruptcy filings in 2025.”
  • The Withum CPA and consulting firm delves into “Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of Duplicate Claims: What Plan Sponsors Should Understand.”
    • “Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how healthcare claims are generated, submitted, and processed. As these technologies mature, both claim volume and complexity are likely to increase, placing additional pressure on traditional payment-integrity controls.
    • “While duplicate and near-duplicate claims are a visible result of this shift, AI also affects other aspects of the payment-integrity lifecycle, including coding accuracy, claim edits, resubmission behavior, and post-payment recovery.
    • “For plan sponsors, the question is no longer whether AI will influence claims administration, but whether current oversight frameworks have evolved to address these broader changes. Understanding duplicate-claim risk, evaluating vendor controls across the payment-integrity continuum, and ensuring transparency are increasingly important for prudent fiduciary governance in an AI-driven claims environment.
    • “As AI continues to reshape healthcare billing and claims processing, plan sponsors should periodically reassess whether their oversight frameworks and vendor controls remain aligned with an increasingly automated claims environment.”

Weekend Update

David Ermer–Congress, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC,

  • These two Congressional hearings scheduled for March 18, 2026, caught the FEHBlog’s eye.
    • House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health
    • 10:15 AM Local Time | 2123 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C.
    • Lowering Health Care Costs for All Americans: An Examination of the U.S. Provider Landscape
    • Meeting Details, and
    • House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health
    • 2:00 PM Local Time | 1100 Longworth House Office Bldg, Washington, D.C.
    • Improving Kidney Health Through Better Prevention and Innovative Treatment
    • Meeting Details

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • MedPage Today reports,
    • “CDC scientists estimate there have been at least 27 million illnesses, 350,000 hospitalizations, and 22,000 deaths from flu so far this season. At the same point last year, the estimates were at least 40 million illnesses, 520,000 hospitalizations, but about the same number of deaths.
    • “Flu infections surged in late December and were especially intense in some parts of the country. New York City health officials called it the most intense season in 20 years.
    • “At least 101 children have died so far this season, down from the unusually bad season in 2024-2025 that set a record for the most child flu deathsopens in a new tab or window this century with more than 200. For those whose vaccination status is known this season, about 85% were not fully vaccinated against the flu.
    • “The flu vaccine may not protect everyone from getting sick, but it can prevent people from becoming severely ill and dying. That’s why getting a flu shot remains worthwhile, Schaffner said.
    • “Relatively low flu vaccination rates did not help this season, but experts also blamed a new flu strain that was not well matched to the vaccine for causing most infections.
    • “The new strain, A H3N2 subclade K, seemed to spread more easily — though it did not necessarily cause more severe illness.”
  • and
    • “Nearly 4% of people in the US initially diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (T2D) between July 2016 and October 2024 were later reclassified as having type 1 diabetes (T1D), a new analysis of data from the TriNetX database showed. 
    • “We still have this problem of identifying people with type 1 diabetes,” said endocrinologist Jeremy H. Pettus, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), who presented the study findings at the 19th International Conference on Advanced Technologies and Treatments for Diabetes (ATTD) 2026.
    • “We really have to think about this and move towards” using autoantibodies more often, he added. 
    • “Individuals who had been initially misdiagnosed tended to be younger than those who retained the T2D diagnosis, but there was no difference when stratified by BMI, Pettus reported. The reclassified group also had higher healthcare utilization.” 
  • Cardiovascular Business tells us,
    • “A new study of U.S. healthcare data found that more than 1 in 3 working-age adults with cardiovascular disease are spending more than 10% of their income on healthcare expenses. In addition, 1 in 10 are facing catastrophic healthcare expenditures. 
    • “The data was published JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology.
    • According to the study’s authors, their analysis calls attention to the impact of the rapidly rising costs of cardiac care and the need for policy changes reducing financial barriers.
    • “Given the confluence of rising costs and worsening cardiovascular health among working-age adults, reducing financial barriers to care must be central to national efforts to improve cardiovascular outcomes in this population,” wrote lead author Smaraki Dash, MD, MPH, with the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and colleagues.
    • “Dash et al. said policies needs to be changed to ensure patients can afford consistent access to preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic cardiovascular services and that they do not forego care. Despite substantial national spending, cardiovascular risk factor control and outcomes have worsened in adults ages 25-64 since 2010. Financial barriers are likely driving these trends, especially among privately insured adults, who face higher out-of-pocket costs than those with public insurance.”
  • The Wall Street Journal relates,
    • “Pain lasts longer for women than it does for men—partly because of differences in testosterone levels, a recent study suggests.
    • “Research has long indicated that men generally recover faster from pain and are less likely than women to develop chronic pain. Now scientists have a better idea why. 
    • “When you get injured, your immune system sends certain white blood cells to calm pain-sensing neurons and inflammation. In men, those white blood cells are more likely to produce a pain-resolving molecule that can quickly quell the ache, according to a recent study in the journal Science Immunology.
    • “The testosterone hormone is probably what drives the increased production of that pain-resolving molecule, known as interleukin-10, the researchers found.
    • “It’s not because women are too emotional or too soft, and the pain is just in their head,” said Geoffroy Laumet, a neuroimmunologist at Michigan State University and study co-author.”
  • and
    • “Legalization of recreational marijuana by many states has made it easier for teens to get access to highly potent and convenient forms of the drug, creating new hazards for teen health. 
    • “New research shows that using it as little as once a month or less as a teenager is linked to an increased risk of developing psychiatric disorders and doing poorly in school.
    • “Of the more than 460,000 teens ages 13 to 17 who researchers asked about cannabis use, the ones who said they had used it in the prior year had a higher likelihood of developing depression and anxiety disorders, according to a study published last month in the journal JAMA Health Forum.
    • “We can’t find a level of cannabis use in a teenager that we don’t see a negative effect,” said Dr. Ryan Sultan, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who treats patients with cannabis use disorder.
    • “The new concerns about the impact of marijuana on kids’ health is one of the factors driving a crackdown on the use of the drug at schools.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Per a Quest Diagnostics news release,
    • “Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (NYSE: DGX), a leading provider of diagnostic information services, today announced that its board of directors has elected Timothy (Tim) Wentworth, a highly seasoned business leader, to serve as a director. Including Mr. Wentworth, the company’s board has eleven members.” * * *
    • “Mr. Wentworth, 65, was most recently chief executive officer (CEO) of Walgreens Boots Alliance, where he helped restructure the company for its sale to Sycamore Partners in mid-2025. Prior to that, he was founding CEO of Evernorth Health Services,the health services organization of The Cigna Group that partners with health plans, employers and government organizations to deliver pharmacy, care, and benefit solutions.”
  • Modern Healthcare reports,
    • Healthcare revenue rose faster than all other services categories in 2025, as increased prices for care and growing demand from an aging population affect the industry. 
    • Revenue tied to the delivery of healthcare services increased 8.6% year-over-year, compared with a 6.1% combined increase for all other categories in the services sector, according to a Modern Healthcare analysis of Census Bureau data. Other industries in the services category include finance, transportation, real estate, entertainment and education.
    • “Despite the gain, the sector’s momentum is slowing. Healthcare revenue rose 10.1% in 2024 and 11.2% in 2023, according to the analysis.
    • “Estimates are based on the Census Bureau’s quarterly surveys for revenue and expenses at companies in select industries. The fourth-quarter survey released Thursday draws data from about 19,500 firms across all industries.” 
  • Medcity News points out,
    • “The Aging Crisis Is Here, and Technology Is No Longer Optional.
    • “We need to pivot from a deficiency to an abundance model – from over-focusing on what an individual cannot do, to making the most of the physical and mental resources at hand to maximize independence, dignity, and quality of life. This includes rethinking physical environments and thoughtfully embedding technology to support capability rather than limitation as we adapt to a new reality.”
  • HR Dive adds,
    • “20%
      • “The percentage of employees who said they view AI as a co-worker, per survey results published by Slingshot and parent company Infragistics.
    • “26%
      • “The share of workers who said they are experimenting with AI to improve their work, according to an analysis published by Gartner.”

Cybersecurity Saturday

David Ermer–Cybersecurity, Generative AI–

From the Iran War front,

  • Dark Reading reports,
    • “Iranian state intelligence has been utilizing the cybercriminal underground to upgrade and provide cover for its offensive cyber activity.
    • “Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has long used hacktivism as a cover when it carries out cyberattacks. On March 11, for example, a wiper attack struck the Fortune 500 medical technology company Stryker. It was claimed by “Handala,” a group that positions itself as a pro-Palestine hacktivist operation, evidently itching to contribute to the ongoing US-Iran war. In fact, it’s a front for Void Manticore, an advanced persistent threat (APT) run out of Iran’s MOIS.
    • “This isn’t a new strategy. What is new, according to recent research from Check Point, is that MOIS hackers have been working with the real cybercriminals they’re pretending to be. Void Manticore, for example, has made the commercial infostealer Rhadamanthys a core element of its attack chains. Other MOIS entities have been linked to cybercrime clusters, even collaborating with ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations.
    • Organizations need to be aware of this, says Sergey Shykevich, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point, “because there can be a case where a SOC or CISO will see something in their network that they associate with cybercrime activity [and label it] of low risk. And in reality, it will be an Iranian threat actor who will be able to execute destructive activities.”
  • The Wall Street Journal tells us on March 12,
    • “Stryker said a cyberattack related to the Iranian conflict is still disrupting its operations, including order processing, manufacturing and shipping.
    • “Stryker experienced a global disruption to its Microsoft systems following a cyberattack Wednesday, which resulted in the company asking 56,000 employees to disconnect from all networks and avoid turning on company devices.
    • “The hackers behind the attack said they were retaliating on behalf of Iran, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
    • “On Thursday, Stryker said operations were still disrupted, but it doesn’t believe its patient-related services or connected products have been impacted.”
  • Security Week adds,
    • “Stryker is a Fortune 500 company that specializes in the manufacturing of surgical equipment, orthopedic implants, and neurotechnology. Headquartered in Michigan, the company employs approximately 56,000 people and reported over $25 billion in revenue for 2025. Its critical role in the healthcare supply chain makes it an essential partner for hospitals worldwide.”
    • “The Iran-linked hacker group named Handala has taken credit for the attack, claiming to have struck an “unprecedented blow” to the company.”
  • and
    • Like other ideologically motivated hackers, profit is not Handala’s goal, according to Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf.
    • “What distinguishes this group is its clear focus on data destruction rather than financial extortion,” he said in an email.
  • Cybersecurity Dive points out,
    • “Stryker said the cyberattack that hit the company this week has disrupted its manufacturing and shipping operations.
    • “The medtech company released the information Thursday night [March 12] in a statement posted to its website. Stryker did not detail the attack’s impact on its systems, but wrote in the statement that the incident has caused disruptions to order processing, manufacturing and shipping.
    • “However, we are working diligently to restore our systems and above all, we are committed to ensuring our customers can continue to deliver seamless patient care,” the company said.
    • Stryker maintained that the incident is contained to its internal Microsoft environment, and there is no malware or ransomware detected.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

  • Federal News Network reports,
    • “U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency have a new permanent leader. The Senate has confirmed Gen. Joshua Rudd to serve as the next director of CYBERCOM and NSA. The two organizations have been without a permanent leader since April, when President Donald Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh from the role. Some Democratic lawmakers objected to Rudd’s nomination, citing his lack of cyber experience needed to immediately step into the dual leadership position. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said that when it comes to U.S. cybersecurity, “there is simply no time for on-the-job learning.” It’s not clear when Rudd will be sworn in.”
  • and
    • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is postponing meetings with industry on a forthcoming cyber incident reporting rule due to the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
    • “The shutdown is also “likely” to delay the final Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) rule, CISA confirmed today [March 9].
    • “In a notice posted to its website, CISA said it won’t be able to hold planned town halls on CIRCIA due to the lapse in appropriations. The town halls were scheduled for today, March 9, through early April.”
  • Cyberscoop relates,
    • “The Trump administration is plotting an interagency body to confront malign hackers, pilot programs to secure critical infrastructure across states and other steps tied to its freshly-released cyber strategy, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said Monday.
    • “The “interagency cell” will bring together agencies like the Justice Department, the Department of State, the FBI and the Pentagon, which will make it clear that going on cyber offense isn’t just about attacking enemies in cyberspace, Cairncross said.
    • “Sure, that’s part of it, but that’s not all of it,” he said at an event hosted by USTelecom. It will include diplomatic efforts, arrests and more, he said. “As President Trump has made clear, he expects results, and he’s empowered the team under him to go get them.
    • “A series of pilot programs will be catered to specific critical infrastructure industries in specific states, such as water in Texas and beef in South Dakota, Cairncross said. Different sectors operate at more or less mature levels, he said.”
  • Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
    • “Inconsistent definitions, overly burdensome information demands and duplicative requirements are some of the problems that U.S. businesses face in dealing with cybersecurity regulations, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.
    • “Critical infrastructure organizations want federal agencies to work together to streamline their rules, according to the March 5 summary of a GAO panel discussion with infrastructure representatives.
    • “Businesses recommended several possible solutions to the regulatory sprawl, including agencies converging on common definitions of key terms.”
  • and
  • Cyberscoop informs us,
    • “41-year-old South Florida man is accused of conducting at least 10 ransomware attacks and helping accomplices extort a combined $75.25 million in ransom payments while he was working as a ransomware negotiator for DigitalMint. 
    • “Five of Angelo John Martino III’s alleged victims hired DigitalMint, which assigned Martino to conduct ransomware negotiations on their clients’ behalf — putting him in a position to play both sides, as the criminal responsible for the attack and the lead negotiator for his alleged victims, according to federal court records unsealed Wednesday.
    • “Martino allegedly obtained an affiliate account on ALPHV, also known as BlackCat, and conspired with other former cybersecurity professionals to break into victims’ networks, steal and encrypt data, and extort companies for ransoms over a six-month period in 2023.
    • “Martino was an unnamed co-conspirator in an indictment filed in November 2025 against Kevin Tyler Martin, another former ransomware negotiator at DigitalMint, and Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former manager of incident response at Sygnia. Goldberg and Martin pleaded guilty in December to participating in a series of ransomware attacks and are scheduled for sentencing April 30.”
  • and
    • “Authorities from multiple countries dismantled SocksEscort, a residential proxy network cybercriminals used to commit large-scale fraud, claiming access to about 369,000 IP addresses since 2020, the Justice Department said Thursday.
    • “Europol, which aided the investigation alongside various law enforcement agencies, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs and the Shadowserver Foundation, said the malicious proxy service compromised routers and IoT devices in 163 countries. Officials said the proxy network’s payment platform received about $5.8 million from its customers.
    • “The globally coordinated action, dubbed Operation Lightning, took down and seized 34 domains and 23 servers in seven countries. U.S. officials froze a combined $3.5 million in cryptocurrency allegedly linked to the botnet that was created from infected devices.
    • “Cybercrime thrives on anonymity,” Catherine De Bolle, executive director at Europol, said in a statement. “Proxy services like SocksEscort provide criminals with the digital cover they need to launch attacks, distribute illegal content and evade detection.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

  • MedTech Dive reports,
    • “Intuitive Surgical was hit by a cybersecurity phishing incident that compromised customer and employee data.
    • “Information was obtained from an employee’s compromised access into Intutive’s internal business administrative network, the surgical robotics firm said in a statement posted to its website. An unauthorized third party accessed information including customer business and contact information, as well employee and corporate data.
    • “The statement was posted on Thursday [March 12], an Intuitive spokesperson said in an email to MedTech Dive.
    • “When the incident was discovered, the company activated its incident response protocols and secured all affected applications.”
  • Bleeping Security adds,
    • “Starbucks has disclosed a data breach affecting hundreds of employees after threat actors gained access to their Starbucks Partner Central accounts.
    • “As the world’s largest coffeehouse chain, Starbucks has over 380,000 employees (also known as partners) and operates nearly 41,000 locations across 88 countries.
    • “In data breach notification letters filed with Maine’s Attorney General and sent to affected employees on Tuesday, the company says that it discovered the incident on February 6.
  • Cyberscoop relates,
    • “Threat hunters and a collection of unconfirmed victims are responding to a series of attacks targeting Salesforce customers, which the vendor disclosed in a security advisory Saturday [March 7]. 
    • “Salesforce is actively monitoring threat activity targeting public-facing Experience Cloud sites, including attempts to take advantage of overly permissive guest user configurations,” the company said in the alert.
    • “The campaign marks the third widespread attack spree targeting Salesforce customers in about six months. 
    • “The number of victims ensnared by the latest attacks is unverified, but ShinyHunters, the threat group asserting responsibility for the attacks, claims about 100 companies have already been impacted.”
  • and
    • “A maximum-severity vulnerability in pac4j, an open-source library integrated into hundreds of software packages and repositories, poses a significant security threat, but has thus far received scant attention.
    • “The defect in the Java security engine, which handles authentication across multiple frameworks, has not been exploited in the wild since code review firm CodeAnt AI published a proof-of-concept exploit last week. The company discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it to pac4j’s maintainer, which disclosed the defectand released patches for affected versions of the library within two days.
    • “Some researchers told CyberScoop they are concerned about the vulnerability — CVE-2026-29000 — because it affects a widely deployed Java security engine that attackers can exploit with relative ease.
    • “A threat actor only needs to access a server’s public RSA key to attempt exploitation,” researchers at Arctic Wolf Labs said in an email. 
  • Cybersecurity Dive points out,
    • “Prolific cybercrime gangs have begun using AI to help them generate malware, signaling a “fundamental shift of dynamics” in the threat environment, IBM’s X-Force threat intelligence team said in a report published on Thursday [March 12].
    • “The malware, which IBM called Slopoly, is “relatively unspectacular” but nonetheless a harbinger of a coming future in which automated code development can rapidly accelerate the hacking life cycle, according to the report.
    • “IBM linked the malware to Hive0163, a group of hackers who have used the Interlock ransomware in several recent major attacks.”
  • Dark Reading notes,
    • “Exploitation of user-managed cloud software has overtaken credential abuse as the method by which most attackers gain initial access to cloud resources.
    • “In its semi-annual “Cloud Threat Horizons Report,” Google found attacks on user-managed software applications — such as the the React2Shell attack targeting a flaw in React Server Components — bested software vulnerabilities to become the most frequently exploited vector for initial access. Overall, “software-based entry,” which includes exploiting software vulnerabilities such as remote code execution (RCE) flaws, accounted for about 44% of all initial-access activity in Google Cloud, the company stated in the report.
    • “The shift is likely due to the company’s focus on secure-by-default strategies and cloud users taking measures to shrink the stolen credentials and misconfiguration attack surfaces, says Crystal Lister, a security adviser in the Office of the CISO at Google Cloud.
    • “As defenders address some of the initial, enduring cloud hygiene issues, attackers are being forced to focus on more sophisticated, automated paths,” she says. “It isn’t necessarily that companies are cutting corners, but rather that the defensive perimeter has moved. Attackers are now targeting the third-party user-managed software running on top of the cloud rather than the cloud infrastructure itself.”

From the ransomware front,

  • Spiceworks explains “why encrypted backups may fail in an AI-driven ransomware era.” Check it out.
  • Healthcare IT News tells us how to stop ransomware disruption with better planning.
    • “Lessons from a LockBit ransomware attack can keep healthcare organizations running when faced with a cyberattack, said Zachary Lewis, CIO and CISO at University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy, in his HIMSS26 Cyber Forum keynote.”
  • Two former federal government cybersecurity officials, writing in Cyberscoop, point out,
    • “We’ve seen ransomware cost American lives. Here’s what it will actually take to stop it.
    • “Hackers have cut their attack timelines from weeks to hours while the government spreads resources too thin. We need to stop pretending we can protect everything and start focusing on what would hurt us most.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

  • Cybersecurity Dive reports,
    • “Google on Wednesday said it completed a $32 billion agreement to buy Wiz, a leading cloud and AI security platform, marking one of the largest-ever acquisitions in the cybersecurity market. 
    • “The deal will allow Google to provide a comprehensive security offering to both government and enterprise customers operating across multicloud environments. 
    • “Wiz works across the leading cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. 
    • “The platform will continue to operate under its own brand name, while providing a broad range of services through its integration with Google Cloud.”
  • Security Week relates,
    • “OpenAI announced this week that it’s in the process of acquiring AI security company Promptfoo.
    • “Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but Promptfoo has raised more than $23 million and was reportedly valued at $86 million (based on PitchBook data) following an $18.4 million Series A funding round in July 2025.
    • “Promptfoo has developed a security and evaluation platform designed to systematically test LLMs and AI agents. * * *
    • “Once it completes the acquisition, OpenAI plans to integrate Promptfoo’s capabilities into its Frontier platform, which enterprises use to build and operate AI coworkers.  
    • “Promptfoo brings deep engineering expertise in evaluating, securing, and testing AI systems at enterprise scale. Their work helps businesses deploy secure and reliable AI applications, and we’re excited to bring these capabilities directly into Frontier,” said Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B Applications at OpenAI.”
  • Cyberscoop tells us,
    • “Artificial intelligence may be enhancing cyber threats, but the defensive approach to those AI-amplified attacks remains the same, a top FBI official said Tuesday.
    • “We have seen actors both criminal and nation-state, they’re absolutely using AI to their advantage,” said Jason Bilnoski, deputy assistant director at the FBI’s cyber division. “But the way attacks unfold have not changed. Cyberattacks still follow basic steps. It just becomes an incredible speed now.”
    • “The best way to deal with those attacks is to implement all the traditional defenses, like those the FBI has been emphasizing as part of its Operation Winter SHIELD media campaign, he said.
    • “Don’t worry about the speed and capability” of AI attacks, Biloski said at a Billington Cybersecurity conference. “If you’re focused on the basics, it’ll help prevent the actual intrusion from occurring.
    • “It’s a message that the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Nick Andersen, also shared at the conference. Sophisticated attackers are out there, he said, but the agency’s recent binding operational directive for federal agencies to get rid of unsupported edge devices was a way of shoring up basic vulnerabilities.”
  • Dark Reading informs us,
  • Tech Target points out how to choose the best mobile hotspot for remote work.
    • “Organizations that support remote work should understand how personal hotspots and dedicated hotspot devices differ. Compare these mobile hotspot options.”
  • Here’s a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

Friday report

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

From Washington, DC,

  • STAT News informs us,
    • “White House officials are steering the Trump administration away from vaccine reform, fearing the political consequences of emphasizing a relatively unpopular issue in a key election year.
    • “But the Make America Healthy Again movement, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a health secretary with a history of anti-vaccine activism — isn’t going along without a fight.”
  • FedWeek reports,
    • “The House government operations subcommittee has scheduled hearings next week on the state of USPS finances and operations, including, in the words of the announcement, “whether USPS is reliable enough for Congress to allow it to borrow more money from the Department of the Treasury.”
    • “USPS is rapidly losing money and becoming more unreliable each year and is dire need of a course-correction. While some progress has been made to improve USPS operations, there is still much more work to be done to reform the agency and make up for the billions it has already lost,” the subcommittee said in scheduling Postmaster General David Steiner and the GAO as witnesses.”
    • The hearing will be held next Tuesday March 17 at 2 pm ET.
  • Federal News Network relates,
    • As the Trump administration’s Schedule Policy/Career nears finalization, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor reaffirmed his view that the pending personnel change is centered on “accountability,” rather than politicization.
    • The OPM director pushed back against criticisms from the federal community, after many warned of a return to a patronage system in the career civil service if the new federal employment classification is finalized.
    • “I think most federal employees know this — and certainly all the ones I’ve encountered have had no problem with this — your job is ultimately to effect lawful actions that the president determines are the appropriate objectives for the organization,” Kupor said during a March 5 event hosted by Federal News Network. “That’s what this does — basically codify what essentially has always been the practice of the executive branch.”
    • Tens of thousands of federal employees are on track to soon be converted to the new Schedule Policy/Career category, leaving them with limited appeal rights and making it easier for agencies to fire them.
    • FEHBlog note — This rule became effective on March 9, 2026.
  • Per an HHS news release,
    • “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through its Office on Women’s Health (OWH), today announced a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the American Urological Association, the American Urological Education and Research, and the Urology Care Foundation (together, the AUA) to promote the appropriate and evidence-based use of local estrogen therapy in postmenopausal women, particularly those experiencing genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM) and recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs).
    • “The collaboration reflects a unified commitment by both institutions to improving women’s health, preventing disease, and enhancing quality of life through safe and effective therapies. Together, HHS and the AUA will exchange information, develop educational resources, and work collaboratively to reach health care providers and women across the country.
    • “This collaboration represents an important step forward in addressing a significant and often undertreated women’s health concern,” said Dorothy A. Fink, M.D., Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health and Director of the HHS Office on Women’s Health. “Many postmenopausal women are not aware that local estrogen therapy is a safe and effective treatment for GSM and recurrent UTIs. By joining forces with the AUA, we can ensure that clinicians and patients alike have access to clear, evidence-based guidance.”
  • Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) tells us,
    • “A new KFF analysis examines Medicare Advantage coverage options in 2026 for the 2.6 million enrollees whose Medicare Advantage plan with prescription drug coverage was terminated at the end of 2025. Plan termination affected 13% of all enrollees in such plans in 2025, more than double the 6% affected the year before.
    • “Medicare Advantage insurers have warned that recent and prospective changes to the Medicare Advantage payment system are driving plan terminations and reductions in benefits. The analysis finds, however, that almost all of the enrollees whose plans were terminated have at least one Medicare Advantage plan with drug coverage (MA-PD) available in 2026, and on average they have more than two dozen plan options to choose from in their area. Most beneficiaries affected by the termination of a plan that had a zero-premium MA-PD option in 2025 also had a zero-premium MA-PD option for 2026.
    • “Just 1.1% of those who were in terminated plans nationwide, or fewer than 30,000 people, have no option for a Medicare Advantage plan with drug coverage for 2026.”
  • KFF also updated its key facts about the CMS drug negotiation program.

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • The University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP tells us,
    • :British drugmaker GSK said today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expanded the approved use of its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine for younger adults at risk of complications from the virus.
    • “In a news release, the company said the FDA approved Arexvy for use in adults aged 18 to 49 who are at increased risk of lower respiratory tract disease (LRTD) caused by RSV. The vaccine was previously approved for all adults aged 60 and over and those aged 50 to 59 at increased risk of LRTD caused by RSV.”
  • BioPharma Dive informs us,
    • “For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration is allowing a certain kind of cell therapy for epilepsy to be tested in humans.
    • “The therapy, created by Shanghai-based Unixell Biotechnology, is designed to curb the excessive electrical activity that triggers seizures in epileptic patients. It uses donor-derived — or “allogeneic” — stem cells reprogrammed so that they ultimately produce the main chemical messenger, “GABA,” responsible for calming the brain and nervous system.” * * *
    • “Yet, Unixell will likely also face newer competition. Decades of research into ion channels — cellular tunnels that often play a role in epilepsy — has finally started to bear fruit.”
  • Cardiovascular Business notes,
    • “Vena Medical, a Canada-based medtech company, has secured U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its Vena MicroAngioscope System—advertised as the “world’s smallest camera”—to be used for intravascular imaging in the peripheral arteries.
    • “The device was designed to help care teams evaluate a patient’s peripheral vasculature without the use of X-ray fluoroscopy. It connects to standard endoscopy equipment and is used in tandem with a balloon distal access catheter to provide real-time color images. The balloon occludes the vessel temporarily and the segment is flushed with saline to enable the camera to directly image the interior of the vessel.
    • ‘In Canada, more than 100 patients have already been treated with the Vena MicroAngioscope System. With this FDA clearance in place, the company now plans to enter the hospitals and health systems in the United States.”
  • Per Fierce Pharma,
    • “The FDA has rejected Hyloris Pharmaceuticals antiviral valacyclovir, an oral suspension for infections caused by herpes simplex and varicella zoster viruses. 
    • “In a complete response letter (CRL), the FDA said it identified issues in an inspection of Hyloris’ third-party manufacturer. The U.S. regulator did not specify the problems in the CRL, explaining that they were itemized to a representative of the production facility.
    • “The CRL was not a surprise. In a release last month, Belgium-based Hyloris explained (PDF) that the FDA had assigned an official action indicated (OAI) classification to the Greek facility after an inspection.” 

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today,
    • “RSV activity started later than expected in most regions of the United States, though illness is not more severe compared with recent seasons. This unusual timing means that higher levels of RSV activity may continue into April in many regions. Emergency department visits and hospitalizations for RSV are highest among infants and children less than 4 years old. Seasonal influenza activity remains elevated nationally. COVID-19 activity is decreasing nationally but remains elevated in some areas of the country.
    • “COVID-19
      • “COVID-19 activity is decreasing nationally but remains elevated in some areas of the country.
    • “Influenza
      • “Overall seasonal influenza activity remains elevated nationally but is decreasing in most areas of the country. Influenza A activity continues to decrease while trends in influenza B activity vary by region.
      • Additional information about current influenza activity can be found at: Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report | CDC
    • “RSV
      • “RSV activity started later than expected in most regions of the United States, though illness is not more severe compared with recent seasons. This unusual timing means that higher levels of RSV activity may continue into April in many regions. Emergency department visits and hospitalizations for RSV are highest among infants and children less than 4 years old.
    • “Vaccination
      • “RSV is a leading cause of hospitalization among U.S. babies.
      • “To help keep babies safe from severe RSV, babies younger than 8 months of age should get protection in their first RSV season (which usually starts in the fall) in one of these ways:
        • “The pregnant mother gets the RSV vaccine during pregnancy, or
        • “The baby gets an RSV antibody (nirsevimab or clesrovimab) just before the start of the RSV season or soon after birth, if born during the season.
      • “A CDC report showed that these protections are working. During the 2024–25 RSV season, infant RSV hospitalization rates were reduced by up to half compared to rates during seasons before when RSV prevention products were available.
      • “Interim estimates for the 2025–26 seasonal influenza vaccine prove getting the vaccine reduced the risk of flu-related doctor visits and hospitalizations, supporting CDC’s vaccination recommendations. For children and teenagers, the vaccine was 38%–41% effective at preventing doctor visits and 41% effective at avoiding hospitalizations for the flu. For adults aged 18 and older, it was 22%–34% effective at preventing doctor visits and 30% effective for preventing hospital stays. Read more here: MMWR.”
  • The American Hospital Association News reported today,
    • “There have been 1,362 confirmed measles cases nationwide this year, according to the latest data published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, 94% are associated with outbreaks. South Carolina and Utah currently have the largest ongoing measles outbreaks in the country. The South Carolina outbreak, which began in October 2025, has slowed in recent weeks and is at 996 cases as of today. Utah’s outbreak, which began in June 2025, has risen to 405 cases as of March 10, marking an increase of 47 cases since last week.” 
  • The Wall Street Journal relates,
    • “Adults should be screened and treated for high cholesterol starting at age 30, if not sooner, according to new clinical guidelines, lowering the age by at least a decade at a time when heart attacks are becoming more common in younger adults. 
    • “The goal is to shift to a more proactive approach to head off problems in younger years, rather than starting lifestyle changes and medical treatment in middle age when a patient may already have damage in their arteries, said Dr. Roger Blumenthal, chair of the committee of cardiologists that wrote the new guidelines. 
    • “Growing research shows how much damage can be done when levels of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol stay high in the blood for years, he said. At the same time, more medicineshave become available to lower cholesterol, along with screening tests and a new online tool that allows people 30 and older to calculate their risk of cardiovascular disease.
    • “We need to pay attention much earlier,” said Blumenthal, director of preventive cardiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine.  
    • “The guidelines, published Friday in two leading cardiology journals, were issued by 11 medical associations, including the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association. These organizations set standards for medical professionals from family doctors to cardiologists.”
  • Per a National Institutes of Health news release,
    • “A team of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that provides decision support to clinicians by predicting if patients are at risk of intimate partner violence (IPV). Using data routinely collected during medical visits, the team trained a machine-learning model, a type of AI, that was highly accurate in detecting IPV among patients in a study. 
    • “IPV refers to abuse from current or former partners that results in serious effects such as potentially life-threatening injuries, chronic pain and mental health disorders. It affects millions of people in the United States — both men and women — at some point in their lives. However, many cases go undetected, because patients can be hesitant to disclose abusive relationships due to safety concerns, fear and stigma. 
    • “In their study, the research team led by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Boston, introduced three AI models for IPV detection in healthcare settings, comparing their performance in predicting it.  
    • “This clinical decision support tool could make a significant impact on prediction and prevention of intimate partner violence,” said Dr. Qi Duan, Ph.D., director of the Division of Health Informatics Technologies at NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). “Given the prevalence of cases, the tool could be a game-changing asset to public health.” 
  • Health Day informs us,
    • “People frequently switch between different weight-loss drugs, swapping Ozempic for Zepbound and vice versa within the first year of treatment, a new study reports.
    • “What’s more, those patients who do swap GLP-1 drugs are more likely to stick with the drugs, researchers reported March 10 in JAMA Network Open.
    • “Switching between GLP-1RA medications should be viewed as a normal part of long-term obesity care,” said senior researcher Sarah Messiah, a professor of epidemiology and pediatrics at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
    • “Persistence should not be judged by staying on a single drug indefinitely, but by maintaining engagement in care and working with clinicians to find sustainable, effective treatment strategies over time,” she said in a news release.”
  • and
    • “Vitamin D3 supplementation does not change the four-week incidence of health care utilization or COVID-19-related outcomes among adults with newly diagnosed COVID-19 but may reduce the risk for long COVID, according to a study published online March 12 in the Journal of Nutrition.”
  • Per BioPharma Dive,
    • “Vima Therapeutics announced Wednesday it has raised $100 million in the hopes of bringing to market a new oral therapy that might help people with certain neurological disorders regain control of movement.
    • “The company was hatched by biotechnology investor Atlas Venture more than three years ago. It’s since advanced a combination drug called VIM0423 to the precipice of mid-stage studies in Parkinson’s disease and dystonia. Both trials are expected to read out in 2027.
    • “Vima estimates that about 160,000 people in the U.S. have isolated dystonia, a chronic and disabling neurological condition that causes involuntary muscle contractions that can worsen as a person moves. For a larger share, dystonia is a symptom of other brain diseases, among them Parkinson’s.”
  • Per Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News,
    • “Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) act as carriers for mRNA and CRISPR payloads across a wide range of therapeutic applications, from cancer to inflammatory and genetic diseases. The same delivery system used in COVID‑19 vaccines is now being adapted for other, more complex targets, but one challenge persists: LNPs transfer their cargo into cells far more readily in the lab than in the body. What makes in vivo delivery so much harder?
    • “A new study from Biohub may have uncovered a surprisingly simple way around this barrier. From Science Translational Medicine, in a paper titled “Amino acid supplementation enhances in vivoefficacy of lipid nanoparticle‑mediated mRNA delivery in preclinical models,” the team reports that co‑injecting three common amino acids with LNPs dramatically boosts both mRNA delivery and CRISPR gene editing efficiency.
    • “Gene editing and mRNA‑based therapies will play increasing roles in the medicine of the future, but they require LNPs to reach and enter cells,” said Shana O. Kelley, PhD, president of bioengineering at Biohub and head of Biohub Chicago, in a press release. “Any LNP formulation being developed today could potentially benefit from our approach.”
    • “Rather than redesigning the nanoparticles themselves—a major focus of the field—the researchers asked: Could the body’s own metabolic environment be making cells less receptive to LNP fusion?
    • “By asking why LNPs perform so differently in the physiological milieu of the body, we found a surprisingly simple answer that could make a wide range of mRNA and gene editing therapies substantially more effective,” said Daniel Zongjie Wang, PhD, who leads Biohub’s Spatiotemporal Omics Group.”

From the HIMSS Conference 2026 front,

  • While the conference ended yesterday, the FEHBlog ran across some interesting stories from the conference today.
  • Healthcare IT News tells us,
    • “Digital transformation demands accurate, trusted identity data
    • “Identity is part of foundational infrastructure and should be strengthened so digital transformation initiatives can truly deliver, says MDM tech exec Rachel Blum at HIMSS26.”
  • Healthcare Dive informs us,
    • “The CMS wants to deploy artificial intelligence tools to Medicare beneficiaries to help navigate their care, CMS officials said at the HIMSS conference Thursday. 
    • The agency is already using the technology to detect fraud. But the CMS also hopes to get the technology into patients’ hands, both to assist seniors and to hopefully bring down rising healthcare spending, which continues to outpace the rest of the economy. 
    • “The fundamental problem right now is that other sectors of the U.S. economy have advanced and been deflationary with their use of technology,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said during a panel discussion. “Healthcare has remained inflationary.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review offers six notes from the conference.
  • Beckers Health IT adds,
    • “As healthcare AI moves beyond the pilot phase, health systems need to build the infrastructure to enable the technology for the long term, according to a recent panel discussion at New York City-based Columbia Business School.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Kaufmann Hall reports,
    • The latest Vizient Research Institute study, The access imperative: Reimagining care delivery for a more complex patient population, concludes that the bulk of hospitalizations in the United States are due to chronic illness. Patients with chronic conditions generate roughly 10 times more inpatient admissions and emergency department visits and more than six times as many office visits compared with those without chronic care needs. On a per capita basis, they generate about 17 times more inpatient days. With more than 80% of hospitalizations involving Americans with at least one chronic condition, chronic care drives most of the healthcare utilization. The findings underscore that healthcare leaders cannot afford siloed care, and the future belongs to organizations that strategically prioritize integrated chronic care models to meet rising demand and manage complexity.
  • McKinsey & Co. points out that “With aging populations and rising chronic disease, improving health span is becoming a societal and economic priority. Here’s what drives it and what can be done.”
  • NAVA Benefits notes,
    • “Women’s health is a career-long conversation, but most benefit packages treat it as a single moment. This piece breaks down six areas where employer coverage still falls short, from menstrual and hormonal health to menopause and chronic conditions, and highlights what leading companies are doing differently. Whether you’re an HR leader benchmarking your benefits or an employee who’s felt the gaps firsthand, it’s a look at what genuinely inclusive coverage can look like.”
  • Per Beckers Hospital Review,
    • “Hospitals and health systems had a rocky start to 2026. Patient demand and revenue growth slowed while expenses intensified, leading to an operating margins dip, according to Strata’s Monthly Healthcare Industry Financial Benchmarks report.”

Thursday report

David Ermer–CDC, Congress, FDA, Federal employment benefits, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, OPM, Telehealth, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC,

  • The Wall Street Journal reports,
    • “Lawmakers boarded planes Thursday and headed home for the weekend, passing through security checkpoints manned by agents working without pay, as Democrats and Republicans blamed each other for the monthlong impasse over funding the Department of Homeland Security.
    • “Funding for DHS lapsed on Feb. 14, held up over demands from Democrats that new restrictions be placed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations as a condition for funding its parent agency. Since then, lawmakers have made no progress in resolving the standoff.
    • “The shutdown has forced a swath of federal workers—including Transportation Security Administration officers at airports—to continue working without pay, contributing to staffing shortages and long security lines at some airports across the country. TSA employees received partial paychecks earlier this month and are due to miss a full paycheck in coming days, just as spring break travel is kicking off. 
    • “Democrats again blocked a measure to fund DHS on Thursday afternoon. Earlier in the day, Republicans blocked a proposal by Democrats to fund individual parts of DHS, including the TSA and Coast Guard but not ICE.”
  • Bloomberg Law relates,
    • “Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chair Bill Cassidy has a wide range of health care affordability priorities he wants to pursue in 2026, including addressing drug costs and price transparency. 
    • “In terms of the [health care] affordability, it is a campaign issue,” the Louisiana Republican said in an interview at an exclusive Bloomberg Government event on Tuesday.
    • “You can tell Tony Fabrizio is in Donald Trump’s ear, right?” referring to the president’s longtime pollster who has released a survey that shows high drug prices top voter concerns, and many have unfavorable views of pharmaceutical companies. 
    • “Some policies Cassidy thinks could help with affordability are price transparency, site-neutrality in Medicare, which equalizes payments between hospitals and off-site physician offices, and pre-funding health savings accounts to help lower-income people buy insurance. 
    • “There are ways in which the cost of health care is affecting the average American that sometimes flies below the radar,” Cassidy continued.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review tells us,
    • “Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said he is opening an investigation into the FDA’s rejection of treatments for rare diseases, including ataluren, a drug used by some patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
    • “Mr. Johnson, who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, announced the inquiry at a news conference March 11. He said the FDA should allow patients access to high-risk treatments with clear disclosures rather than remove those options altogether, according to a report from Spectrum News 1.”
  • Federal News Network reports,
    • “Federal annuitants who have been waiting for weeks on a key tax document from the Office of Personnel Management should keep an eye on their mailboxes in the coming days.
    • “In an email sent Wednesday, OPM informed federal retirees who requested physical copies of their 1099-R forms that the remaining paper documents were being sent out this week, and should be delivered in the next three to five days.
    • “If retirees who requested a physical copy of their 1099-R form do not receive it by March 18, they should email OPM, “so that we can look into it and help get you your form,” OPM wrote Wednesday in its message to annuitants, viewed by Federal News Network.
    • “OPM Director Scott Kupor further confirmed on social media that the remaining paper tax documents would be delivered shortly. He said about 93% of annuitants have either downloaded digital copies of their documents, or already received a copy of the tax form in the mail.”
  • Tammy Flanagan, writing in Govexec, tells us,
    • “Women in federal service still face retirement gaps.
    • “Lifetime earnings, career interruptions and caregiving responsibilities continue to shape retirement outcomes for women in federal service.” * * *
    • “While challenges exist, federal employment offers tools that women can leverage so they can prepare for retirement.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • STAT News reports,
    • “The Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on telehealth companies’ marketing of compounded versions of weight loss drugs. In recent months, the agency has warned them against implying that their products are FDA approved, or that they themselves manufacture the products.
    • “But those companies may not be the only ones under the microscope. 
    • “The telehealth companies that have been warned — with names like Lovely Meds, Hello Cake, and MEDVi — don’t directly prescribe the medications, which are not approved by the FDA or evaluated for safety and efficacy. That falls to the clinicians in medical groups affiliated with the companies. And a STAT analysis shows that cited companies can share clinical DNA.
    • “Among more than 70 telehealth companies warned by the FDA in the last six months, at least 30% have publicly stated affiliations with just four nationwide medical groups: Beluga Health, OpenLoop, MD Integrations, and Telegra. 
    • “These “white label” telehealth practices, which allow brands to quickly plug into a stable of clinicians often licensed to practice medicine across the country, have helped telemedicine companies grow rapidly. But in doing so, they are now closely tied to an industry attracting government regulators’ scrutiny.” 
  • Fierce Pharma adds,
    • “Though it’s hard to say exactly what the future holds for mass GLP-1 compounding, the pressure is mounting from multiple angles in the U.S. as drugmakers and the FDA alike seek to crack down on the practice. 
    • “Now, Eli Lilly—which has already staged multiple efforts in court to protect sales of its diabetes and obesity meds Mounjaro and Zepbound from compounders, medical spas and telehealth firms—is launching a new salvo focused on the potential safety risks behind a common compounding tactic. 
    • Lilly cautioned Thursday that through its own testing, it has “uncovered significant levels of an impurity” in certain compounded products marketed in the U.S., which seem to stem from a chemical reaction between vitamin B12 and tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound. 
    • “Lilly called the impurity “concerning” given what little is known about its short- or long-term effects in humans, as well as its potential to interact with the GLP-1 itself or how it is absorbed, distributed, metabolized and eliminated from the body. 
    • “The Indianapolis pharma stressed that tirzepatide has never been studied in combination with B12 and warned that the compounders making these products, who are beholden to different regulations than branded drugmakers are, aren’t required to monitor and report potential negative reactions to their medicines.” 
  • Cardiovascular Business lets us know,
    • “Toro Neurovascular, a California-based medtech company focused on developing new treatments for stroke and other neurovascular conditions, has secured U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its new Toro 88 Superbore Catheter.
    • “The large-bore device was built to provide support, trackability and stability during the treatment of time-sensitive stroke patients. According to Toro Neurovascular, the company worked closely with physicians to ensure it can deliver value to care teams treating even the most challenging cases. 
    • “Satoshi Tateshima, MD, PhD, a professor of interventional neuroradiology at UCLA, performed the first clinical use case with the Toro 88 device in the United States.”

From the public health, medical and Rx research front,

  • Cardiovascular Business reports,
    • “The U.S. cardiovascular mortality rate decreased dramatically from 2000 to 2011. Since then, however, it has remained relatively unchanged, according to new findings published in JACC.
    • “Cardiovascular mortality in the United States declined steadily for more than five decades; yet, progress slowed beginning around 2010,” wrote first author Adith S. Arun, BS, a research fellow with Yale New Haven Hospital and Yale School of Medicine, and colleagues. “Recent work has described this pattern as a ‘disquieting plateau,’ a period in which gains in cardiovascular outcomes have stalled despite major advances in therapies and an expanding clinical armamentarium. At the same time, national healthcare spending has reached historic levels.” * * *
    • “The researchers did note that the growth in spending is somewhat expected due to an aging patient population and the high costs associated with emerging technologies. At the same time, they wrote, “the value of these technologies depends on both their clinical effectiveness and their pricing.”
    • “The group also highlighted the importance of prevention efforts and lifestyle interventions as health systems look to keep healthcare costs down and potentially get cardiovascular mortality to start dropping again. 
    • “Click here to read the full study in JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review relates,
    • “West Virginia had the highest rate of fatal opioid overdoses of any state in 2024, according to a new analysis from KFF. 
    • “The analysis is based on finalized 2024 opioid overdose death totals from the CDC’s WONDER database, which uses ICD-10 codes to identify deaths where synthetic and prescription opioids are listed as a contributing cause. Rates are age-adjusted per 100,000 population using the 2000 U.S. standard population distribution. The data includes both deaths involving illegally manufactured and pharmaceutical fentanyl.
    • “The national opioid overdose death rate was 16 per 100,000 residents in 2024. More broadly, the U.S. recorded its largest-ever annual decline in overall drug overdose deaths, with the national rate falling from 31.3 per 100,000 in 2023 to 23.1 per 100,000 in 2024.”
  • MedPage Today tells us,
    • “This season’s influenza vaccine effectiveness rates against outpatient visits and hospitalizations may be lower than last season’s, according to an interim CDC analysis.
    • “During the current flu season, 88% of subtyped influenza A-positive specimens have been H3N2, 93% of which have been an antigenically drifted subclade K version that’s different from the 2025-2026 flu vaccine virus.
    • “These national trends were mirrored in the nation’s most populous state, California.”
  • and
    • “In cancer patients with brain metastases and type 2 diabetes, those using GLP-1 drugs had a 37% lower risk of death over 3 years.
    • “Significant mortality benefits were linked to semaglutide and dulaglutide, but not with liraglutide.
    • “The risk of all-cause mortality was consistently lower with GLP-1 drugs among patients with primary cancers of the lung, breast, and melanoma.”
  • Infectious Disease Advisor informs us,
    • “Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination may provide strong protection among men, highlighting its role in comprehensive disease prevention and gender-neutral control of HPV-related morbidity and mortality.”
  • Health Day notes,
    • “Providing support to stressed-out parents might help their children avoid obesity, a new study says.
    • “Children were more likely to eat healthy and not gain weight if their parents participated in training to help manage stress, researchers reported March 6 in the journal Pediatrics.
    • “We already knew that stress can be a big contributor in the development of childhood obesity,” senior researcher Rajita Sinha, director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a news release.
    • “The surprise was that when parents handled stress better, their parenting improved, and their young child’s obesity risk went down,” Sinha said.”
  • Science points out,
    • “Scientists have plenty of ideas about why aging impairs memory. Reductions in blood flow in the brain, shrinking brain volume, and malfunctioning neural repair systems have all been blamed. Now, new research in mice points to another possible culprit: microbes in the gut.
    • “In a study published today in Nature, scientists show how a bacterium that is particularly common in older animals can drive memory loss. This microbe makes compounds that impair signaling along neurons connecting the gut with the brain, dampening activity in brain regions associated with learning and memory, the team found.
    • “This is a tour de force,” says Haijiang Cai, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona who studies gut-brain communication and was not involved in the work. “They define the pathway all the way from aging and bacteria … to cognitive function—it’s really impressive.” However, he and others emphasize it remains to be seen whether a similar mechanism exists in humans—and if so, how important it is compared with other drivers of cognitive decline.”
  • STAT News relates,
    • “Jim Wells, a biologist at the University of California San Francisco, was studying proteins on the surface of cancer cells when he noticed one that wasn’t supposed to be there. This protein, called Src, should only be tucked inside cells.
    • “An accident,” he said, and a serendipitous one. Wells and his team report in Science that they have found Src on the surface of malignant cells, not healthy donor tissue.  This discovery may bring scientists closer to a long-sought goal: finding an ideal immunotherapy target for solid tumors.
    • “It was certainly provocative and exciting to see this cancer-associated Src kinase now presented on the cell surface,” said Kathleen Yates, a biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University who did not work on the study. But, she added, it’s still too early to know how much clinical benefit there will be from targeting Src on the cell surface. “They’ve accomplished a great deal. It is an outstanding question as to whether this will be translationally impactful,” she said.”
  • Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News adds,
    • “After becoming the world’s first patient treated with a bespoke base editing therapy, baby KJ Muldoon is now healthy and free from the toxic ammonia buildup caused by his rare genetic metabolic disorder that initially presented a 50% mortality rate in infancy. While his story highlights the life-changing potential of gene editing, it also underscores a major challenge for the field: expanding these therapies to benefit broader patient populations.  
    • “KJ’s urea cycle disorder stemmed from a single disease-causing mutation that could be precisely targeted. However, many genetic disorders arise from numerous mutations scattered across a gene, making individualized corrections far too resource-intensive to scale.
    • “Ben Kleinstiver, PhD, associate investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and co-author of the NEJM study describing KJ’s case, told GEN that insertion of large DNA sequences at programmable locations in the genome holds tremendous promise as a generalizable medicine that could treat patients regardless of their underlying disease-causing mutations. His team has recently taken one step closer to making large gene insertions safer for therapeutic applications. 
    • ‘In the new study published in Nature titled, “Immune evasive DNA donors and recombinase license kilobase-scale writing,” Kleinstiver and colleagues, in collaboration with Full Circles Therapeutics, have developed a circular single stranded DNA donor (ssDNA) that enables kilobase-scale integration while remaining non-toxic to cells.”

From the HIMSS Conference 2026,

  • Fierce Healthcare reports,
    • “The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is ramping up major federal interoperability initiatives on several fronts.
    • “As part of this interoperability work, the Trump administration unveiled in July a sweeping health tech initiative that aims to modernize Medicare and advance next-generation digital health for patients, including conversational artificial intelligence, digital IDs and easier ways to access health data.
    • “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is spearheading an API-focused data exchange framework to enable sharing of patient medical records through a new initiative called the CMS Aligned Network. This work is meant to accelerate data sharing at a faster pace than can be achieved through regulations alone, according to Amy Gleason, acting administrator, U.S. DOGE Service, and strategic advisor to the CMS.”
  • The Wall Street Journal adds.
    • “Microsoft MSFT is betting on healthcare as a path to become more competitive in artificial intelligence. The company’s biggest push yet: a new tool it describes as an AI concierge doctor—one that can access your medical records and health data, with your consent. 
    • “The company on Thursday unveiled Copilot Health, a feature within the Copilot app that lets the chatbot dispense personalized healthcare advice informed by the user’s disease history, test results, medications, doctors’ visit notes and biometric data as recorded by wearable devices. 
    • “Health data imported into the feature will be encrypted and firewalled from the rest of the app to address the privacy concerns of handing over one’s medical records to a generative AI platform, Microsoft AI Chief Executive Mustafa Suleyman said in an interview.
    • “It’s something that Microsoft is uniquely placed to do with our scale, with our regulatory experience, with the kind of trust and confidence that people have in our security and the history that we have as a mature, stable player,” Suleyman said.”

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

  • Modern Healthcare reports,
    • “North Dakota rural hospitals are showing they don’t need the help of a large health system to provide more primary care while driving down costs.
    • “In 2023, more than 20 critical access hospitals formed the Rough Rider High-Value Network, seeking to share data and collective resources to standardize care and improve financial performance.
    • “It’s been less than three years, but the network’s early results are a good sign for the concept given the pressure on margins at all hospitals, and especially those in far-flung communities. Rural providers in five other states have since banded together in similar coalitions of independent hospitals while many of their peers join larger health systems.” 
  • Beckers Health IT relates,
    • “More than 80% of physicians use artificial intelligence in their professional practice — more than double the share in 2023, according to a March 12 survey from the American Medical Association.
    • “AMA polled 1,692 U.S. physicians across various specialties, practice settings and career stages about their use and perception of AI. Responses were collected between Jan. 15 and Feb. 2. About 38% of participants practiced in group settings and 24% in hospitals.” 
  • Per an Institute for Clinical and Economic Review news release,
    • “The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) today released a Draft Evidence Report assessing the comparative clinical effectiveness and value of oveporexton (Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.) for narcolepsy type 1.
    • “This preliminary draft marks the midpoint of ICER’s eight-month process of assessing this treatment, and the findings within this document should not be interpreted to be ICER’s final conclusions.
    • “Register for ICER’s Early Insights Webinar
    • “On March 24, as part of ICER’s Early Insights Webinar Series, ICER’s Senior Vice President of Research, Foluso Agboola, MBBS, MPH, will present the initial findings of this draft report. This webinar is exclusively available to all users of the ICER Analytics platform; registration for the webinar is now open.
    • “Submit a Public Comment
    • “The Draft Evidence Report and Draft Voting Questions are now open to public comment. All stakeholders are invited to submit formal comments by email to publiccomments@icer.org, which must be received by 5 PM ET on April 7, 2026. * * *
    • “ICER’s Patient Portal and Manufacturer Engagement Guide  provide additional detail on what types of information may be most informative to the report.”

Midweek report

David Ermer–CMS, Congress, FDA, Federal employment benefits, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, Medicare, Obesity, Patient safety, Rx coverage, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC

  • Healthcare Dive reports,
    • “Overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans are causing seniors’ Medicare premiums to spike by billions of dollars, according to new report from congressional investigators.
    • “Medicare Part B premiums rose by $212 per enrollee in 2025, totaling $13.4 billion in higher premiums, due to health insurer practices like recording extra member diagnoses to inflate government reimbursement, the report from the Joint Economic Committee published Tuesday found. [FEHBlog note — CMS tells us that the Medicare premium rose $10.30 monthly from 2024 to 2025 or $123.60 annually]
    • “Health insurance groups argued that the report is based on flawed data and that MA saves money and drives better health outcomes for enrollees.”
  • Beckers Payer Issues relates,
    • “Elevance said it was “surprised and disappointed” by a recent CMS sanction threat, which would suspend enrollment in Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans, CFO Mark Kaye said March 10 at the Barclays 28th Annual Global Healthcare Conference in Miami.
    • “The executive claimed Elevance flagged provider-submitted diagnosis codes and shared information with CMS “in good faith.”
    • “The issues CMS raised relate to historical risk-adjustment processes. They do not reflect our current operating processes or practices,” he said.
    • “Mr. Kaye said he views the issue as a misalignment with policy interpretation.
    • “This is not simply a data submission issue. We view this as a broader policy and payments dispute about how retroactive corrections should be treated under the risk-adjustment framework that was in place during that period,” Mr. Kaye said. “This is a disagreement over the interpretation of policy. It’s not an unwillingness to correct inaccurate data.” He said the rules at the time were in line with Elevance’s conduct.” 
  • The Hill brings us up to date on the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
  • Per CMS news releases,
    • “The Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is committed to improving health care and outcomes, and strengthening accountability, across the nation’s health- and long-term care systems.
    • “Over the next several years, CCSQ will focus on five strategic goals—Prevention, Quality and Safety, Coverage Innovation, Data and Technology, and Burden Reduction. These priorities build on CCSQ’s core mission to establish national health and safety standards; implement quality measurement, reporting and improvement; and support Medicare’s coverage determinations. Together, they represent a roadmap for health- and long-term care systems that are safer, stronger, and more transparent.”
  • and
    • The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today issued new guidance to strengthen public trust and ensure patients and their families are treated with dignity and care throughout the organ donation process. The guidance clarifies and reinforces the responsibilities of Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs) and donor hospitals, both in providing patients full medical care regardless of potential donor status and allowing families the time to make decisions regarding organ donation without coercion. This action follows reports that some OPOs have rushed aspects of the organ donation and procurement process, pressuring families to make decisions during moments of grief. 
  • Govexec tells us,
    • “The No. 1 thing to know entering retirement: How much are you really spending?
    • “Many new retirees may overestimate how far their savings will go towards their budget. Having an idea of your cost of living can make them go further.”

From the Food and Drug Administration,

  • Per an FDA news release,
    • “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today launched a new unified platform for analyzing adverse event reports. This platform — called the FDA Adverse Event Monitoring System (AEMS) — represents a major achievement in the agency’s mission to modernize and provide radical transparency into the safety of regulated products.  
    • “The FDA’s previous adverse event reporting systems were outdated and fragmented and made important data difficult to access. These clunky systems also wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and created blind spots in our postmarket surveillance of products ranging from drugs and vaccines to cosmetics,” said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H. “We’re fixing the problem through a major modernization initiative. Starting today, the FDA will have a single, intuitive adverse event platform that will better serve agency scientists, researchers, and the public.”
  • Health Exec informs us,
    • “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has released an early alert pertaining to patient safety, after the agency said it became aware of an issue with flexible cryoprobes—used to deliver extreme cold to a site on the body for a variety of medical purposes, including removing tissue tumors—manufactured by Erbe USA.
    • “According to the FDA, the company reported incidents of its cryoprobes “rupturing or bursting during activation,” leading to excessive pressure at sites of foreign bodies, mucus plugs, blood clots, necrotic tissue, or biopsies—essentially anything a provider is trying to remove.”

From the public health, medical and Rx research front,

  • The New York Times reports,
    • “In a survey by the health research group KFF and The Washington Post, released in September, 16 percent of parents said they had skipped or delayed at least one childhood vaccine other than for flu or Covid-19. And doubts about vaccines are increasingly spilling into refusal of other mainstays of pediatric medicine, including antibiotics, medications like Tylenol and diagnostic procedures like spinal taps.
    • “At a hospital in Boise, Idaho, for example, three infants died last year after their parents declined a shot of vitamin K, administered to newborns to prevent bleeding, said Dr. Amanda Lee, a pediatrician there.
    • “Parents have always had questions about vaccines, but Dr. Lee and other pediatricians say they are now finding their expertise to be sometimes powerless against the flood of misinformation.” * * *
    • “Conferences of pediatricians now routinely hold workshops on earning parents’ trust. They are training clinicians to be less authoritarian, less judgmental and more patient, said Dr. Brandan Kennedy, a pediatric hospitalist in Kansas.”
  • Medpage Today tells us,
    • “Semaglutide for weight loss (Wegovy) was associated with a significantly higher risk of ischemic optic neuropathy (ION) compared with the diabetes formulation (Ozempic) and other GLP-1 agonists.
    • “Added to the existing evidence base, the study suggests a dose-dependent risk of ION.
    • “Men treated with Wegovy had a threefold higher risk of ION versus women.”
  • and
    • “The COBRRA trial directly tested apixaban and rivaroxaban, the oral anticoagulants most frequently used to treat acute venous thromboembolism.
    • “The risk of clinically relevant bleeding came out significantly lower with apixaban than with rivaroxaban during the 3-month treatment period.
    • “The study-specific dosing regimen may have played a role in the results, however.”
  • and
    • “Over 40% of smokers who received one psilocybin dose quit by month 6 versus 10% of nicotine patch users in a pilot randomized trial.
    • “No serious adverse events were reported, and the most common side effects with psilocybin were temporary increases in blood pressure and nausea.
    • ‘Psilocybin works by increasing “mental flexibility,” allowing patients to reframe their relationship with addiction, researcher said.”
  • Health Day lets us know,
    •  “Women who have pregnancy complications might face a higher risk of heart disease, a new study has concluded.
    • “The stress of these complications increase a woman’s risk of high blood pressure for years after they deliver, researchers reported March 9 in the journal Hypertension.
    • “For women who were having babies for the first time and had complications, referred to as adverse pregnancy outcomes, we found that higher stress levels over time were associated with higher blood pressure levels two to seven years after delivery,” lead researcher Virginia Nuckols, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Delaware, said in a news release.”
  • and
    • “An already-approved IV drug significantly reduces the symptoms of lupus, a new clinical trial showed.
    • “More than three-quarters of lupus patients taking obinutuzumab (Gazvya) had a significant improvement in their symptoms after a year on the drug, researchers reported March 6 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
    • “The drug also improved time between lupus flares, and had a more than doubled remission rate compared to placebo, researchers said.”
  • Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News informs us,
    • “Researchers headed by a team at the University of California San Diego have found that a novel blood-based biomarker can predict a woman’s risk of developing dementia as many as 25 years before symptoms appear. The study, involving more than 2500 women, showed that higher levels of phosphorylated tau 217 (ptau217)—a form of tau protein that reflects early brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease—were strongly associated with future mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia among older women who were cognitively healthy at the start of the study, before any memory or thinking problems were detected.
    • “Our study suggests we may be able to identify women at elevated risk for dementia decades before symptoms emerge,” said Aladdin H. Shadyab, PhD, MPH, UC San Diego associate professor of public health and medicine at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science and the School of Medicine. “That kind of long lead time opens the door to earlier prevention strategies and more targeted monitoring, rather than waiting until memory problems are already affecting daily life.”
  • MedPage points out,
    • “The nation’s safest hospitals, according to annual rankingsopens in a new tab or window from Healthgrades, represent the top 10% of hospitals nationwide for patient safety, with the lowest incidences of 13 preventable patient safety events.
    • “Patients treated at these 438 hospitals, located across 40 states, were significantly less likely to experience the four most common patient safety indicators, characterized as serious, preventable complications, which account for 78% of all safety events, including:
      • “In-hospital falls resulting in fracture: 52.4% less likely
      • “Collapsed lungs due to a procedure or surgery in or around the chest: 57.5% less likely
      • “Catheter-related bloodstream infections acquired in the hospital: 67.8% less likely
      • “Pressure sores or bed sores acquired in the hospital: 71.9% less likely
    • “The data behind this year’s Patient Safety Excellence Award highlights how measurable improvements in safety can prevent thousands of complications,” said Alana Biggers, MPH, medical advisor at Healthgrades, in a press release.
  • Per BioPharma Dive,
    • “Biogen on Wednesday unveiled updated data showing its spinal muscular atrophy drug salanersen slowed neurodegeneration and improved motor function in an early-stage study.
    • “The trial enrolled patients who had already been treated with the Novartis’ gene therapy Zolgensma, and found a reduction of 75% in neurofilament light chain levels, a measure used to evaluate neurodegeneration. Half of those patients also achieved a motor function milestone according to World Health Organization standards.
    • “As part of the update, Biogen also revealed the design for a late-stage study that includes three separate trials of salanersen in newborns, infants already treated with Zolgensma, and teens and older adults who have either not been treated or previously took another SMA drug, Roche’s Evrysdi.”
  • Per Fierce Pharma,
    • “After strutting its stuff against blockbusters in three head-to-head psoriasis trials, UCB’s Bimzelx has conquered another powerhouse product—AbbVie’s Skyrizi—in psoriatic arthritis (PsA).
    • “A phase 3b study of 553 adults with active psoriatic arthritis has achieved its primary objective, showing the “statistically significant superiority” of Bimzelx over Skyrizi in reducing disease activity as measured by the ACR50 endpoint at Week 16, the Belgian company said.”
    • “ACR50 is a composite efficacy measurement, specified by the American College of Rheumatology, which indicates 50% or greater improvement from baseline in tender or swollen joint counts in addition to 50% improvement in three of five other disease markers.”  

From the HIMSS conference front,

  • Fierce Healthcare reports,
    • “Epic is ramping up more artificial intelligence capabilities and features as it also touts how its AI tools drive measurable outcomes beyond just faster documentation time. 
    • “Health systems are reporting earlier diagnoses, fewer denials and improved patient experiences, the company said.
    • “At the 2026 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Global Health Conference & Exhibition, which kicked off Monday, Epic teased its future AI road map with new features across clinical, patient-facing and operational workflows.”
  • and
    • “Samsung Electronics and digital health company b.well Connected Health are working together to toss out the traditional patient clipboard and replace it with smartphones.
    • “Samsung Galaxy smartphone users, through the Samsung Health app, will now have digital access to their complete health history and can share their medical record with participating providers via a QR code. That eliminates the intake paperwork patients fill out at nearly every healthcare visit, according to the two companies. 
    • “Despite advances with technology, patients typically still fill out the same paperwork at the doctor’s office and often have to repeat pertinent medical information from memory and log into multiple portals.”
  • Health Tech Magazine adds,
    • “Documentation overload, clinical burnout and rising operational costs are just some of the challenges healthcare organizations face today. This can have a major impact on clinician satisfaction and retention.
    • “Microsoft Dragon Copilot is one way health systems can address these concerns. The artificial intelligence-powered tool streamlines clinical documentation, giving clinicians more time in their day for seeing additional patients or other important tasks. In addition to improving clinical workflows, Dragon Copilot improves documentation, creates more accurate coding and improves the patient experience.
    • “At HIMSS26 in Las Vegas, HealthTech spoke with two Microsoft Dragon Copilot experts about what problems it solves, how it integrates with the electronic health record, how it can be used across departments and clinical specialties, and tips for implementation success.”
  • Healthcare Dive notes,
    • “Amazon is expanding access to its health-focused artificial intelligence chatbot, the technology giant said Tuesday. 
    • “The Health AI assistant first launched for members of Amazon’s primary care chain One Medical in January. The tool allows users to connect their health information and ask questions about their health, symptoms and potential treatments. 
    • “Now, the tool is rolling out to all U.S. consumers. “The desire to ask questions of an AI agent is enormous,” Dr. Andrew Diamond, chief medical officer at Amazon One Medical, told Healthcare Dive at the HIMSS conference Tuesday. “It is clearly the fastest way for people to get their basic health questions answered. And even basic is almost putting it too simply. They’re getting pretty in-depth questions answered.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Beckers Hospital Review reports,
    • “American hospitals saw expenses grow 7.5% in 2025, more than twice the rate of growth in hospital prices that year, according to the American Hospital Association’s annual “Costs of Caring” report.
    • “The findings, which were drawn from industry benchmark data compiled by Strata Decision Technology, point to a system under mounting strain: Hospitals are treating more patients, those patients are getting sicker and the cost of supplies from drugs to disposable gloves is increasing quicker than reimbursements can keep up with.
    • “Rising costs for labor, supplies, drugs, and administrative burdens caused by corporate insurers, combined with caring for sicker patients, have created challenges for hospitals and health systems,” AHA President and CEO Rick Pollack said in a March 11 news release shared with Becker’s. “These strains are jeopardizing hospitals’ ability to provide around-the-clock care and services that patients and communities need.”
  • and calls attention to ten hospital M&As finalized in 2026.
  • Fierce Healthcare relates,
    • “It’s not a secret that commercial payers are navigating an earnings slump.
    • “Weighed down by elevated member utilization and staring down stagnant proposed Medicare Advantage (MA) rates for 2027, insurers are looking to lessen the pain by securing more favorable network contracts with providers and increasing scrutiny of reimbursement claims.
    • “The former has recently led to some high-profile dustups in which MA contracts with health systems are permitted to expire, while the latter has forced hospitals to devote more resources toward combating denials. 
    • “However, for-profit hospital and ambulatory surgery center chain Tenet Healthcare isn’t viewing payer pushback as a major headwind. In last month’s earnings call, executives told analysts that its commercial rate updates are so far landing in a healthy range of 3% to 5%. The company is also almost entirely contracted for 2026, and about 80% contracted for 2027, they said.”
  • and
    • “Carrum Health, which offers value-based specialty care for employers, is teaming up with Virta Health on weight management.
    • “Virta offers virtual counseling, nutrition coaching and medication management with GLP-1s. Employers can customize Virta’s offering depending on their benefits. Meanwhile, Carrum has already provided bariatric surgeries for weight management. 
    • “Now, members can be referred and coordinated between the two as needed.”
  • Fierce Pharma tells us,
    • “Twelve months ago, drugmakers came roaring into 2025, fueled by a massive year of growth that peaked in the fourth quarter of 2024. Now, the momentum has dissipated, and most companies are bracing for a slowdown in sales heading into 2026. 
    • “In fact, over the last few weeks of earnings reports, drugmakers’ financial results were less noteworthy than their guidances. Of 25 companies with quarterly revenue of at least $2 billion that had reported through March 5, just five projected that their sales would grow at a higher rate in 2026 than in 2025, with each of those increases slight.
    • “The pharmas offered a variety of reasons—macro and micro—for their pessimistic 2026 projections. Several mentioned pricing effects related to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as well as U.S. President Donald Trump’s most-favored-nation plan and his threats of tariffs on pharmaceutical products. An anticipated decline in vaccine sales, linked to a demand shortfall in the U.S., also plays into the computation for several companies, while many others are dealing with the loss of exclusivity (LOE) of blockbuster products.”

Tuesday report

David Ermer–CDC, Congress, Employee Wellness Programs, FDA, Federal employment benefits, Generative AI, Medical / Rx research, Mental health care, OPM, Rx coverage, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC

  • The Washington Post reports on the continuing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
  • Federal News Network reports,
    • “Agencies are closing in on an opportunity to hire talent for temporary technology jobs, after the Office of Personnel Management released its first two shared certificates on Tuesday for the Trump administration’s “Tech Force” program.
    • “Lists of eligible candidates for software engineering and data engineering positions are now available for participating agencies to review and potentially hire, an OPM spokesperson confirmed to Federal News Network. If hired, selected employees would move into two-year roles to temporarily work on technology-related initiatives.
    • “Candidates who are listed on the new shared certificates have already passed three rounds of hiring evaluations, including a technical assessment, a resume review and a screening interview, said OPM Director Scott Kupor.”
    • “We hope to have several hundred people now who passed all three phases of that, where we will put them on a shared certificate, and then we will start to push that certificate out to all the participating agencies,” Kupor said during a March 5 event hosted by Federal News Network. “The agencies then have an opportunity, if they so choose, to do an additional round of interviews, if they want to make sure the person is the right fit for their organization.”
  • MedTech Dive tells us,
    • “The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, launched a new program on Tuesday to support development of biosensors that can track multiple signals such as inflammation markers, hormones or drug levels within the body.
    • ‘The program, called Delphi, will focus on using electronic “chiplets,” with the goal of being able to “mix and match” features across wearables and ingestible sensors.
    • “The initiative comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has emphasized a role for wearables in tracking health habits. Last year, the secretary said he wanted all Americans to use wearables, and the Food and Drug Administration’s device center launched a pilot that would allow the agency to waive premarket requirements for certain digital health devices while they collect real-world data under a Medicare program.”
  • Kevin Moss, writing in Federal News Network, points out special features of FEHB and PSHB plans.

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

  • Fierce Pharma reports,
    • “About five months after U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touted leucovorin as “an exciting therapy that may benefit large numbers of children who suffer from autism” during a White House press conference, the FDA has approved the decades-old drug for a rare genetic condition with “autistic features” that represents a small subset of autism patients.
    • “The FDA has approved GSK’s brand-name leucovorin calcium tablets, Wellcovorin, to treat cerebral folate deficiency (CFD) but only in patients who have a confirmed variant in the folate receptor 1 (FOLR1) gene.”
  • and
    • “Issues at a former Catalent plant now owned by Novo Nordisk have derailed another FDA application, with Incyte announcing Friday that the FDA handed over a complete response letter for its PD-1 inhibitor Zynyz as a first-line treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
    • “The rejection was not related to any efficacy or safety concerns but rather inspection findings at a fill-finish facility—specifically, the former Catalent plant in Bloomington, Indiana, which is now owned by Novo as part of Novo Holdings’ $16.5 billion acquisition of the CDMO in 2024.
    • “The setback comes more than a year after Incyte detailed a 25% reduction in the risk of death for a combination of Zynyz and chemotherapy versus chemo alone among patients with newly diagnosed metastatic NSCLC in the phase 3 Pod1um-304 trial.” * * *
    • “In a March 9 statement to Fierce Pharma, a Novo spokesperson said the company is “actively engaging with the agency to address its findings.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review informs us,
    • “Ipsen, a Paris-based drugmaker, is removing its cancer drug Tazverik (tazemetostat) from the U.S. market because of safety concerns. 
    • “An ongoing Tazverik clinical trial has reported adverse events of secondary hematologic malignancies — which are blood cancers — indicating “the risks may outweigh potential benefits for patients,” Ipsen said in a March 9 news release. 
    • “The FDA granted Tazverik accelerated approval in 2020. The drug is approved to treat epithelioid sarcoma, a rare, aggressive soft tissue cancer that affects a few hundred patients each year, and relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
    • “The company said it is voluntarily withdrawing Tazverik in all indications.”

From the judicial front,

  • Beckers Payer Issues reports,
    • “On March 8, a judge for the U.S. District Court in Connecticut approved a preliminary injunction against Aetna, ordering the insurer to alter its gender-affirming care policy for two plaintiffs.
    • “Several transgender women sued Aetna in 2024 over denied gender-affirming facial reconstructions. The complaint pointed to Aetna’s Clinical Policy Bulletin 0615, which outlines parameters for gender-affirming care.” * * *
    • “Under the preliminary injunction, Aetna must individualize coverage for Jamie Homnick, PhD, and Gennifer Herley, PhD, two of the plaintiffs. Both women lack access to this coverage and have been facing depressive symptoms due to gender dysphoria, a court document said.
    • “Aetna has a strong track record as a proud ally of the LGBTQ+ community and is committed to meeting the healthcare needs of all our members. As a third-party administrator for self-funded plan sponsors, our role is to administer benefits in accordance with the specific terms set forth by each plan,” Aetna said in a statement shared March 10 with Becker’s. 
    • “Many employer benefit plans may include customized coverage for gender-affirming procedures. We work closely with our plan sponsors to meet their unique needs and preferences while complying with all applicable regulations and legal requirements,” the statement continued. “We strongly disagree with the allegations in this lawsuit and will defend ourselves vigorously.” 
  • Here’s a link to the Leapfrog CEO Leah Binder’s statement about the Tenet Healthcare decision mentioned in yesterday’s post.
  • Per a Justice Department news release,
    • “The Department of Justice released today the first-ever Department-wide corporate enforcement policy for criminal matters, promoting uniformity, predictability, and fairness in how it pursues white-collar cases to protect the American people.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

  • Bloomberg Law reports,
    • “South Plains, Texas, had long declared its measles outbreak over when in January wastewater testing picked up what Zachary Holbrooks called “a blip, a spike.”
    • “The testing found measles after months without traces of the virus, which by the 2025 West Texas outbreak’s end infected over 750 people, hospitalized nearly a hundred, and two children died.
    • “With samples sent to Baylor University weekly, subsequent testing hasn’t picked up further traces, said Holbrooks, executive director for the South Plains Public Health District. The goal is to “test long-term” and see “if anything shows up.”
    • “With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting over 1,200 confirmed measles cases and 12 new outbreaks in 2026, states across the US are taking similar steps to those taken in West Texas to manage infections, mounting outreach strategies, easing access to vaccines, and more.
    • “Working against such efforts are low vaccination rates in pockets of states where misinformation and distrust of government spur outbreaks.
    • “Any state should be looking across its communities and identifying areas where the vaccination rates are lower than 95%. Those are the places that are very ripe for outbreaks,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center.”
    • “Given 2025’s outbreak cycle, states should’ve been better prepared, Nuzzo said. Now, they’ll need to undertake “the very slow, laborious ground game of building trust” in communities to encourage vaccination.”
  • The latest issue of NIH’s Research Matters covers the following topics:
  • Healio relates
    • “Adults with type 2 diabetes who adhered to eight healthy lifestyle habits had a 60% lower risk for cardiovascular events than those who reported zero or one healthy lifestyle habits, researchers reported.
    • “In a prospective cohort study of adults with type 2 diabetes enrolled in the U.S. Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program, researchers assessed the risk for major adverse CV events according to the number of self-reported healthy lifestyle habits for each participant. The risk for CV events declined with each additional lifestyle habit a person reported, and the findings were similar regardless of whether adults were using a GLP-1 receptor agonist.”
  • and
    • “Risks for cognitive impairment increased with more advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) stages. 
    • “Associations were strongest for higher urinary protein-to-creatinine ratio plus lower eGFR. ***
    • “Our findings suggest that measures of CKD severity may be relevant to consider in combination with known dementia risk factors, such as age or comorbid conditions,” [Tanika} Kelly [PH.D, MPH] told Healio. “Cognitive screenings should be considered if a patient or family member notice cognitive or behavioral changes.”
  • Health Day informs us,
    • “People think of aging as a steady decline, with seniors gradually losing their physical abilities and mental agility as the years wear on.
    • “But a new study suggests that seniors can – and often do – improve over time, with the right mindset.
    • “Nearly half of seniors 65 and older showed measurable improvement in their brain health, physical function or both over time, researchers reported in the journal Geriatrics.
    • “Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” lead researcher Becca Levy, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, said in a news release.
    • “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process,” Levy said.”
  • and
    • “Smoking weed, taking a hit of cocaine or popping some amphetamines can raise a person’s risk of stroke – even if they’re a younger adult.
    • “Coke and amphetamines can double or triple the risk of stroke for any adult, researchers reported in the International Journal of Stroke.
    • “Weed also increases stroke risk, but to a lesser extent, British researchers said.
    • “This is the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted on recreational drug use and stroke risk and provides compelling evidence that drugs like cocaine, amphetamines, and cannabis are causal risk factors for stroke,” lead researcher Megan Ritson said in a news release. She’s a postdoctoral research associate with the University of Cambridge.”
  • Cigna, writing in LinkedIn, discusses how employers can help improve the mental health of their male employees.
    • “Men face unique barriers to seeking mental health support, including stigma, societal expectations, and concerns about confidentiality at work.
    • “Untreated mental health conditions among men contribute to higher healthcare costs, absenteeism, and turnover.
    • “Employers that normalize mental health conversations, protect privacy, and offer tailored support men’s mental health can improve outcomes for employees and business performance.”
  • STAT News notes
    • “Several years ago, nephrologists attempted a first-of-its-kind effort: remove race from a key clinical algorithm, and attempt to undo the harms of the race-based equation for those who were still being negatively affected by it. 
    • “Until 2021, eGFR, which is used to measure kidney function, was inflated by around 16% to 21% for Black patients — which could mask severe kidney disease and delay urgently needed transplants. Not only was the equation phased out in 2022, but the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network mandated that transplant programs submit modifications for Black patients waiting for transplants. 
    • Several years ago, nephrologists attempted a first-of-its-kind effort: remove race from a key clinical algorithm, and attempt to undo the harms of the race-based equation for those who were still being negatively affected by it. 
    • Until 2021, eGFR, which is used to measure kidney function, was inflated by around 16% to 21% for Black patients — which could mask severe kidney disease and delay urgently needed transplants. Not only was the equation phased out in 2022, but the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network mandated that transplant programs submit modifications for Black patients waiting for transplants. 
  • and
    • “Vertex said Monday that a drug it secured as part of a $4.9 billion acquisitionsuccessfully reduced by half a key marker of a kidney disease known as IgA nephropathy.
    • “The results, from a Phase 3 trial, match data from a study of Otsuka’s recently approved Voyxact and are numerically superior to data released last year by Vera Therapeutics.
    • “All three companies have been racing to treat a disease that affects 330,000 people across the U.S. and Europe, according to Vertex’s estimates, putting many at risk of developing end-stage renal disease. Analysts have projected Vertex’s drug could eventually bring in $4 billion or more in annual sales.” 

From the HIMSS conference front,

  • Health Tech Magazine reports,
    • The HIMSS Global Health Conference and Exhibition is back in Las Vegas this year, with the tagline “Expert Insights, Exceptional Impact.” 
    • The annual conference kicks off Tuesday with an opening keynote from venture capital leader Jon McNeill (whose experience includes Tesla and Lyft) and Dr. John Halamka, the Dwight and Dian Diercks President of the Mayo Clinic Platform. 
    • Other notable keynote speakers throughout the week include Sumbul Ahmad Desai, vice president of health and fitness at Apple, on Wednesday; and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on Thursday (the final day of the conference). 
    • Before HIMSS 2026 began in full swing, Monday saw a day of preconference sessions organized around topics such as artificial intelligence in healthcare, cybersecurity, interoperability and health information exchanges, among others. 
    • The AI in healthcare preconference track saw healthy attendance with a focus on tangible use cases and lessons on how to deploy AI into improved or better-integrated workflows.
  • Heathcare Dive digs into regulation of artificial intelligence issues.
  • MedCity News adds,
    • “Verily and Samsung are teaming up to accelerate clinical research using wearable data, the companies announced Monday at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. 
    • “The companies are integrating user data from Samsung Galaxy smartwatches into Verily’s precision health platform, Verily Pre, so pharma companies and government agencies can run studies and monitor participants remotely.
    • “Researchers will be able to collect continuous health data from study participants wearing Samsung watches, including metrics such as heart rate, sleep and physical activity. The information will flow back into Verily’s data platform, allowing pharma companies and regulators to track patients’ health over time and quickly analyze real-world data.
    • “Consumer wearables are becoming “real, bonafide research-grade instruments,” according to Myoung Cha, Verily’s chief product officer.” 
  • In related news, “Ratnakar Lavu, chief digital information officer at Elevance Health, sat down with MobiHealthNews for an in-person interview to discuss the framework the health insurance company uses to validate and scale AI in healthcare.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

  • Fierce Healthcare reports,
    • “Centene’s stock took a nosedive on Tuesday as the company’s top brass offered further color on the marketplace headwinds battering its performance.
    • “CEO Sarah London said during the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference that membership in its Affordable Care Act exchange plans was down to 3.6 million as of February, from 5.5 million at the end of 2025. She said the team expects that to decline further to about 3.5 million by the end of Q1.” * * *
    • “The company had braced for a likely downturn in enrollment following the expiry of the enhanced premium tax credits and the planned implementation of program integrity measures that proved controversial in the industry.” * * *
    • “Given that these shifts are driven in part by the end of the enhanced subsidies, London said that the member mix in the bronze tier does look different than in years past. Prior to the rollout of the enhanced subsidies in response to the pandemic, the bronze tier was largely made up of younger, healthier individuals.
    • “Now, the insurer is seeing people select a bronze plan because it’s a lower cost option to ensure they maintain coverage, even if they were previously in a silver or gold plan, she said.”
  • Modern Healthcare relates,
    • “Elevance Health is expanding [to California] a policy to penalize hospitals that refer patients to out-of-network providers. [The purposes of this sensible policy is to reduce No Surprises Act claims.}
    • “The insurance company has introduced the policy in at least 11 other states. 
    • “The American Hospital Association and Federation of American Hospitals have pushed back against the policy.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review tells us,
    • “Private equity firms have become a major force in healthcare, investing more than $1 trillion over the last ten years, according to a recent report from New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
    • “The report, published March 10 and authored by Michael Goldhaber, examines how private equity’s investments have impacted patient care, hospital finances and medical access.
    • “There is a healthcare crisis in the United States. Costs are rising, driven by market consolidation, increased insurance premiums, escalating drug prices and other changes,” the report said. “Many hospitals and healthcare facilities are experiencing staffing shortages. These and other factors mean that the poorest people in the U.S. have worse health outcomes than those in other high-income countries, despite the high level of spending.”
  • Fierce Healthcare adds,
    • “Highly concentrated—and, by extension, less economically competitive—hospital markets are ubiquitous across the country and the norm in rural states Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota, according to a market analysis tool unveiled this week by Yale University’s recently launched Health Care Affordability Lab.
    • “Every hospital in those three states operates in a market deemed to be highly concentrated or even monopolistic based on their Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a metric used by the “Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to determine when it should intervene in a deal on competitive grounds. 
    • “More broadly, the tool shows that 94% of the nation’s hospitals operate in markets with HHIs above 1,800, reflecting a highly concentrated market.” 
  • BioPharma Dive lets us know,
    • “Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, who co-founded BioNTech and led its rise to prominence as a COVID-19 vaccine maker, are leaving the company to establish a new startup focused on mRNA technology. 
    • “BioNTech said Tuesday that Sahin and Türeci, who’ve been serving as CEO and Chief Medical Officer, respectively, will step down by the end of the year. Afterwards, they’ll steer a startup working on “next-generation mRNA innovations.” BioNTech will grant that unnamed biotech certain rights to its mRNA technology in exchange for a minority stake, but won’t provide ongoing capital support, the company said.
    • “BioNTech, meanwhile, will focus on advancing a late-stage portfolio that now includes several different cancer medicines. The company said its supervisory board has initiated a search to identify successors for Sahin and Türeci and ensure a “smooth transition.” It’ll provide more details on the partnership with the new startup once an official deal is signed. Paperwork should be completed by the end of the first half.”
  • Beckers Hospital Review points out,
    • “Statista, a global data company that publishes insights for 170 industries, projects four cancer therapies will be among the top 10 best-selling pharmaceutical products in the U.S. this year. 
    • “The company projects Merck’s cancer drug Keytruda will earn $12.7 billion in U.S. revenue in 2026 — nearly twice that of the second top-selling medication, according to data shared March 9 with Becker’s. 
    • “[The article identifies] the medications Statista projects will be the 10 best-selling U.S. pharmaceutical products in 2026.”
  • Fierce Pharma notes,
    • “Sandoz has not minced words about the massive yet largely untapped opportunity biosimilar makers are presented with as dozens of branded medicines inch toward the patent cliff in the next decade. 
    • “Now, in an effort to fully capitalize on what the company recently referred to as a potential “‘golden decade’ of affordable medicines” after 2030, Sandoz is committing even further to its biosimilar business with plans to launch a dedicated unit that will operate separately from the company’s remaining small molecule generics division.”
    •  “The new biosimilar unit, focused on development, manufacturing and supply of copycat biologic drugs, will be led by Armin Metzger, most recently chief technical operations officer at fellow Swiss drugmaker Ferring Pharmaceuticals.”
  • Per MedTech Dive,
    • “Medtronic said Tuesday it agreed to acquire neurovascular technology company Scientia Vascular for $550 million, with the potential for undisclosed milestone payments after the acquisition.
    • “Scientia’s neurovascular access devices are used to navigate the brain’s complex vasculature to treat conditions such as strokes and aneurysms.
    • “The Scientia proposal is Medtronic’s second deal of the year, after the company announced an acquisition of CathWorks for up to $585 million in February.”