Biotech & Medtech
Biotech & Medtech news — Thursday 22 October 2026
34 stories from 5 sources, every one in English. Each links to its publisher.
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STAT+: Gilead to pay $45 million to settle kickback charges filed by Texas attorney general
STAT News
Gilead Sciences agreed to pay $45 million to settle allegations of paying kickbacks that improperly influenced prescriptions paid for by the Texas Medicaid program, the latest pharmaceutical company to reach a deal with the state over…
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Amazon, Google and Other Major Employers Back CMS Prior Auth Effort
MedCity News
Amazon, Axon Enterprise, Google, Meta and Oracle backed expanding electronic prior authorization to self-funded employer health plans. The post Amazon, Google and Other Major Employers Back CMS Prior Auth Effort appeared first on MedCity…
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Moderna, Merck shares fall on eagerly anticipated cancer vaccine results
BioPharma Dive
A combination of the shot and the immunotherapy Keytruda cut the risk of relapse or death by 42% in a landmark melanoma study that met Wall Street expectations but triggered a “sell-the-news reaction,” one analyst wrote.
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STAT+: Detailed data confirm Moderna and Merck cancer vaccine met key endpoints in melanoma trial
STAT News
MADRID — A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine reduced the risk of disease recurrence in patients with melanoma by 42% compared to a standard treatment, according to a large clinical trial conducted by the drugmakers Moderna and Merck. The…
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STAT+: AbbVie skin disorder drug succeeds in late-stage trial, but results miss market expectations
STAT News
AbbVie reported on Thursday that an experimental therapy for hidradenitis suppurativa, a chronic skin condition, succeeded in a late-stage trial but missed market expectations, leaving experts doubtful the drug can compete with the current…
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STAT+: Nutrition experts press White House to release ultra-processed food definition
STAT News
More than 80 nutrition researchers and experts are calling on the White House to release the federal government’s proposed definition of ultra-processed foods, after its unveiling in August was canceled at the last minute under pressure…
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Alcon Expands Its Cell Therapy Ambitions With $550M Neurotech Pharma Acquisition
MedCity News
Alcon’s Neurotech Pharmaceuticals acquisition brings the rare vision disorder cell therapy Encelto as well as the platform technology that developed it. Last year, Alcon acquired a majority stake in Aurion Biotech, a startup developing a…
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Top MAHA adviser Calley Means resigns from White House days ahead of midterms
STAT News
WASHINGTON — A top Make America Healthy Again adviser to the Trump administration has resigned, less than two weeks before a midterm election that may serve as a referendum on the MAHA movement. Calley Means, who joined the administration…
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Biohaven’s previously rejected rare disease drug to get fresh FDA review
BioPharma Dive
U.S. regulators have accepted a new submission for Vyglxia, offering the chance at a turnaround for another rare disease medicine spurned by previous FDA leadership.
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STAT+: Will the Treasury restrict U.S. investment in the Chinese biotech sector?
STAT News
Want to stay on top of the science and politics driving biotech today? Sign up to get our biotech newsletter in your inbox. My backyard tortoise, Philbert, has for some reason chosen my closet as his preferred brumation burrow. This is not…
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GLP-1 compounder issues recall for copycat Zepbound
BioPharma Dive
The notice adds to growing concerns about the safety of knockoff weight loss drugs, which have remained popular despite FDA warnings and legal pressure from Eli Lilly and Novo.
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Roche affirms sales outlook amid doubts about its future
BioPharma Dive
Lower-than-expected sales of Xolair stood out as the Swiss drugmaker readies for an onslaught of generic competition for top products.
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STAT+: Crackdowns loom, from China to New York
STAT News
You’re reading the web edition of D.C. Diagnosis, STAT’s twice-weekly newsletter about the politics and policy of health and medicine. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Speaking on the economy, the vice…
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STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about a U.S. rule on Chinese deals, Belgium refusing Mounjaro coverage, and more
STAT News
Top of the morning to you. Blue skies, cool breezes, and plenty of chirping birds are enveloping the comfy Pharmalot campus, which is cause to fire up the trusty tea kettle for a needed cuppa stimulation, and we invite you to join us…
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STAT+: What to expect from the Moderna-Merck cancer vaccine data reveal
STAT News
This is the online version of Adam’s Biotech Scorecard, a weekly newsletter featuring exclusive, spicy analysis on the biotech industry. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. It’s my first time in Madrid. What should I see, other…
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Why SDoH Programs Fall Short — and What It Takes to Make Them Work
MedCity News
Throwing more money at SDoH programs isn’t going to magically fix them. Instead, plans should be focusing on building out these three specific capabilities that, together, can noticeably alter the playing field. The post Why SDoH Programs…
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STAT+: FDA has finalized its guidance on apps related to drugs
STAT News
Y ou’re reading the web edition of STAT’s Health Tech newsletter, our guide to how technology is transforming the life sciences. Sign up to get it delivered in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday. Good morning health tech readers! Today…
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Health insurance premiums jump 9%, and more Americans don’t have access to coverage
STAT News
It’s getting harder to dodge “You Can See Everything” spoilers, but you know what I’ll never dodge? STAT’s award-winning journalism. Speaking of, today’s newsletter features two stories from the illustrious Tara Bannow, who explains why…
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INVEST Digital Health Celebrates Healthcare Innovation in Texas
MedCity News
In addition to a packed conference agenda and tours of the Pegasus Park healthcare and life science innovation hub in Dallas, INVEST Digital Health also includes an innovation showcase with novel health tech and medtech offerings as well…
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STAT+: Workers are paying 9% more for family health coverage this year, a higher jump than in the recent past
STAT News
Health insurance costs are climbing even more quickly for people who get workplace coverage, according to the gold-standard survey from the nonprofit KFF. The amount that workers pay in premiums for a family health insurance plan jumped 9%…
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Opinion: What I got wrong about the Affordable Care Act — and how to fix it
STAT News
In November 2009, I joined 10 other economists in a letter urging Congress to pass a bill that became the Affordable Care Act. I could hardly imagine what would come next. The ACA promised to expand coverage, and it did. But I signed the…
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STAT+: Telehealth leapfrogs FDA approval with off-label GLP-1 prescriptions for addiction
STAT News
For the popular diabetes and obesity medications known as GLP-1s, addiction medicine is one of many possible promising next acts. Eli Lilly is investigating a new drug, brenipatide, and testing it in alcohol use disorder. A new company…
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Opinion: The inherited disease my family called ‘it’ had a name, which changed everything
STAT News
The disease didn’t have a name in our house. It had descriptions: the way her hands shook or she lost her words midsentence. The way she could be fully present at breakfast then somewhere unreachable by dinner. And it had a history. My…
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Quality-Diversity Red-Teaming: Automated Generation of High-Quality and Diverse Attackers for Large Language Models
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2506.07121v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ensuring the safety and robustness of large language models (LLMs) is a fundamental challenge and a critical prerequisite for the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence…
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Gate Initialisation versus Recurrent Dropout and Zoneout in Learning Long Dependencies: A Controlled Study of LSTM and GRU Networks on Synthetic Tasks
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.29034v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dropout and zoneout are routinely added to long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks, but, to our knowledge, their placements have not been crossed with gate…
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Unit-Aware Differentially Private Quantum Machine Learning for Clinical and Wearable Health Data
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.28968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical registries and wearable sensors support early health-risk assessment, yet models trained on these records may leak sensitive information when released. Differential privacy (DP)…
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Bio-Inspired Auditory Processing: Coupling Parallel Resonate-and-Fire Dynamics with Ternary Recurrent Networks for Speech Recognition
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.29720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient inference through sparse, event-driven computation, yet remain constrained on continuous, context-dependent tasks such as automatic…
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BrainCodes: A Lightweight EEG Foundation Model over Discrete Neural Codes
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.29320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models increasingly emphasize model scale, potentially limiting their deployment on resource-constrained devices and in everyday environments…
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Reconstruction differences rival individual differences in the fly compass connectome and break trained circuit models
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.29205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural network models are increasingly constructed from synapse-resolution connectomes, and the same circuit is now available in reconstructions from other animals and pipelines. We do not…
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Probing Spatial and Spectral Grounding in EEG Foundation Models
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.29367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: EEG foundation models are advancing at an unprecedented pace, yet their evaluation is driven by downstream accuracy, which reveals little about whether their predictions rely on…
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HGM-Dual: Lineage-Aware Guided Agent Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Planning
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2610.30042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Harness optimization, which improves an agent's prompts, tools, and workflows, is an increasingly effective way to enhance agents built on frozen or closed-source LLMs. Leading approaches…
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Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Logical Compliance of Predictive Models
arXiv cs.NE (Neural／Bio)
arXiv:2606.20208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning models are predominantly evaluated through predictive performance metrics such as ranking quality, prediction error, or classification accuracy. While these metrics…
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Recordanelles capture transient gene expression in single human cells
Nature Biotechnology
Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 22 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03350-7 RNA sequencing can capture high-resolution snapshots of a cell’s transcriptome, but transient changes in individual cells cannot be captured over long…
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Human Argonaute 2 is a programmable targeting domain for RNA editing
Nature Biotechnology
Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 22 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03358-z ALTER is a programmable RNA base editor built entirely from human proteins. By using human AGO2 instead of bacterial CRISPR–Cas proteins, ALTER…