Trump's Medicaid freeze, Ozempic for kidney disease, and 23andMe for sale: Pharma news roundup
President Donald Trump's move to freeze federal funding for a massive number of government programs impacted Medicaid payment systems across the country, briefly locking 72 million Americans out of their health insurance Tuesday. Novo Nordisk said this week that its diabetes drug Ozempic was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as the first GLP-1 treatment for chronic kidney disease. 23andMe (ME), the company that popularized consumer genetic testing, announced this week that it is once again exploring 'strategic alternatives,' which could include a potential sale of the company.
Check out those stories and more pharmaceutical news highlights from this week.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said on Wednesday that it would seek 'greater transparency' in drug price negotiations under President Donald Trump's administration. The statement follows criticism from the pharmaceutical industry regarding the program. 'As the second cycle begins under the Trump Administration, CMS is committed to incorporating lessons learned to date from the program and to considering opportunities to bring greater transparency in the Negotiation Program,' the agency said in a statement.
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23andMe, the company that popularized consumer genetic testing, announced Tuesday that it is once again exploring 'strategic alternatives,' which could include a potential sale of the company or a restructuring. In a press release on Tuesday, the company said it needs additional liquidity to fund its operations and that 'management has determined that there is substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern.'
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Novo Nordisk (NVO) announced today that its blockbuster drug Ozempic was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as the first GLP-1 treatment for chronic kidney disease among people with type 2 diabetes. The popular diabetes drug can now be used to reduce the risk of kidney disease worsening, kidney failure, and death due to heart disease in adults with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
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President Donald Trump's move to freeze federal funding for a massive number of government programs seems to have impacted Medicaid payment systems across the country, potentially locking 72 million Americans out of their health insurance. Several lawmakers took to social media on Tuesday afternoon to confirm that their state's Medicaid payment systems have been shut off. 'The White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage. We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent,' White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt wrote in a post on X on Tuesday.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump's nominee for health secretary, reportedly expressed openness to seizing drug patents of high-priced drugs as a way to lower prices. Politico reports that Kennedy indicated during a closed-door meeting with Senate Finance Committee staffers that he would consider adopting a proposal championed by progressive lawmakers like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The outlet cited three unnamed sources familiar with the exchange.
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The millennial-targeted telehealth company Hims & Hers (HIMS) is spending big bucks on its first-ever Super Bowl commercial to hawk its affordable weight-loss treatments. With Super Bowl ads reportedly costing about $7 million for a 30-second spot this year, Hims & Hers likely spent about $14 million for its one-minute commercial.
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Pharmaceutical companies have already raised the price of over 800 brand-name prescription drugs this year. The increases apply to list prices before accounting for insurance, rebates to pharmacy benefit managers, or other discounts. This year's increases reflect a significant increase from Dec. 29 of last year, when drugmakers had shared plans to raise prices on just over 140 brands. More price hikes are also expected to be announced through the end of January, historically the busiest month for drugmakers to make increases.
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LinkedIn (MSFT) co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman on Monday launched an AI startup aimed at discovering new treatments for cancer. Manas AI will use a proprietary AI-driven platform to help speed up the drug discovery process, from identifying potential drug candidates with 'paradigm-shifting speed and accuracy' all the way to clinical trials, Hoffman said in a press release. The company is initially focusing on treatments for breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma. Eventually, it intends to target other autoimmune diseases and rare conditions.
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In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. 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It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. 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The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. Bhattacharya, the NIH, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants —originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, ' the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled
