July 6, 2026

The need-to-know this morning

Novartis is buying the privately held Myricx Bio for $1.1 billion upfront, picking up an antibody-drug conjugate platform designed to create cancer-fighting drugs for different solid tumors and overcome some of the limitations of existing ADCs. The deal for the U.K.-based Myricx includes milestone payments of up to $400 million and extends Novartis' recent acquisition spree.

artificial intelligence

Anthropic CEO understands biology's stubborn limitations

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is tempering his own bold predictions about AI transforming biotechnology, STAT’s Matt Herper writes. While, sure, AI could eventually compress decades of scientific progress into years, biology’s inherent complexity and glacial timelines mean that future remains years away.

AI is being used to some aplomb in drug discovery, clinical trials, and health care productivity, even if its most ambitious promise — dramatically improving the odds of discovering successful medicines — has yet to materialize. The upshot? This is a technology, Matt writes, that is likely to produce incremental but commercially valuable improvements long before some sort of biological revolution.

“And why I'm very specifically not saying we're going to get all this crazy stuff by 2028 or something. There’s simply no way to do it. There’s all this inertia,” Amodei told Matt. “If you just think of biology as kind of this engineering system, like, we just need to make things more rational, make things make more sense, it just kind of doesn’t work … Because this isn’t a designed system. It’s this super messy, evolved system.”

clinical trials

DEI crackdown notwithstanding, Republicans advance efforts to diversify clinical trials

Although the Trump administration has rolled back DEI provisions across federal agencies, congressional Republicans are showing support for clinical trial diversity efforts, STAT’s John Wilkerson writes. A House appropriations report “encourages FDA to continue to implement legislation and policies requiring study sponsors to submit a diversity action plan for phase 3 studies of new drugs.”

The report, which accompanied a bill to fund the FDA, argues that studies still fail to adequately enroll patients from rural and underserved communities. The FDA has yet to finalize its guidance after the Trump administration pulled a draft from its website — though later it restored it with a disclaimer criticizing its ties to “gender ideology.”

“This page does not reflect reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it,” the website says.

DRUG PRICING

Medicare proposes steep 340B drug payment cuts

Medicare is proposing to slash payments for drugs purchased through the 340B drug discount program by more than a third, STAT’s Tara Bannow writes. Recent hospital surveys show many providers acquire the drugs at far lower prices and, in some cases, patients’ cost-sharing exceeds the hospitals’ acquisition costs, the agency says.

A nearly $4.6 billion reduction in drug payments would be offset by an 8.4% increase in payments for nondrug outpatient services. But hospital groups are concerned, saying the new policy would effectively shift money from nonprofit safety-net hospitals, which participate in 340B, to for-profit hospitals, which do not.

“This enormous cut will make drugs less affordable for America’s most vulnerable patients — many already struggling with higher insurance premiums, loss of healthcare coverage, and skyrocketing drug prices,” Ashley Thompson, the American Hospital Association’s senior vice president of public policy analysis and development, said in a statement.

regulation

Former surgeon general wants peptide pragmatism

Former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams is urging the FDA to take a middle-ground approach to regulating the booming market for wellness peptides. In an opinion piece for STAT, Adams argues that outright crackdowns will only push consumers toward unregulated online sellers.

Ahead of a July advisory committee meeting on whether pharmacy compounding of certain peptides should be permitted, Adams says the agency should allow selected compounds to be dispensed through licensed pharmacies under clinician supervision. Wellness peptides could be reasonably safe, he says, so long as there are clear patient disclosures and quality standards — and, crucially, that outcomes are tracked. A framework like this, he says, would reduce harms and generate real-world safety and efficacy data.

“We do not need to abandon scientific rigor,” he writes. “We need to apply it more pragmatically to how care is actually being sought and delivered in 2026.”

More around STAT