special report

A 20-year quest and a Duchenne breakthrough

Sandy Huffaker for STAT

Debra Miller’s son Hawken was 7 years old when he was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A year later, she learned about a new approach to treatment for the disease, known as exon-skipping. She began devoting her time to supporting the research, raising money and even flying with Hawken to Europe to try getting him into clinical trials. But it never seemed to work out for her family, or for the drugmakers testing this approach. Exon-skipping sparked a civil war within the FDA, leading a top official to override reviewers who said companies had failed to develop anything more than a “scientifically elegant placebo.”

Through all this, Miller and her son waited. He lost the ability to walk and made good with God. Then, at 27, he finally got into a trial for an exon-skipping drug, thanks in part to his mother’s fundraising powers. The results, as Hawken put it, were miraculous. Read more from STAT’s Jason Mast, who beautifully lays out the science and the humanity behind this divisive class of medicines.

politics

What does MAHA look like these days?

Like many others, I first learned about the Make America Healthy Again movement in October 2024 from STAT’s Isabella Cueto, who wrote a prescient feature on Casey and Calley Means. But the movement has changed a lot since those days. A new Politico poll of more than 3,800 people has some interesting findings:

• Nearly three-quarters of adults who identify as MAGA supporters now also identify as MAHA backers. Half of respondents who voted for Trump in 2024 count themselves as MAHA.
• Forty-two percent of MAHA supporters say vaccines are a core issue for the movement.
• While there are a variety of ideas about where the movement should go, a majority of MAHA followers see these as core principles: removing ultra-processed foods from people’s diets, artificial dyes from foods, reducing the impact of forever chemicals, restricting junk food purchases through SNAP, and limiting pesticide use.
• Some of the less popular views among MAHA supporters are interesting, too: 39% say making GLP-1s more affordable is a core principle. Another 35% say restricting abortion access is. Twenty-nine percent say banning cell phones from school is core to MAHA, while 28% say banning kids from social media is.

cancer

Missed opportunities in cancer treatment

Many cancer patients never receive genomic testing that could guide treatment, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open. That means they never learn if they could benefit from newer, more targeted therapies.

“The fact that you’re still seeing half of patients not getting genomic testing is extremely concerning,” breast medical oncologist Igor Makhlin told STAT’s Angus Chen. “There’s increasing rates of testing over time, but not keeping up with standard of care, regardless.” Read more from Angus on why this might be happening.