The Readout Loud

Helen Branswell was a renowned infectious disease reporter who earned the respect and admiration of experts and public health officials with her authoritative, prescient reporting on the flu, polio, Ebola and the Covid-19 pandemic.

This week’s episode of “The Readout LOUD” is dedicated to Helen, who died last week due to complications of cancer. We speak with her colleagues at STAT, family and public health leaders about her work and her legacy.

Longevity medicine is now estimated to be a multitrillion dollar industry. But what are people paying for, and does it work?

On this week's episode of “The Readout LOUD,” STAT's biotech podcast, we bring on STAT reporter Sarah Todd to discuss the booming industry of longevity health and her visit to one of the many longevity clinics popping up in major hospitals across the country.

How has the National Institutes of Health been spending its budget? Why are biotech investors feeling gloomy? And what is the most quintessential Boston movie?

We discuss all that and more on this week’s episode of “The Readout LOUD,” STAT’s biotech podcast. We bring on STAT reporter Anil Oza and Heather Pierce, senior director of science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, to discuss the how the NIH distributed its money in the latest funding cycle and the effects on U.S. biomedical research.

We also chat about the shuttering of a CRISPR CAR-T biotech, the Nobel Prize in medicine, and biotech investors’ current mood.

On this week’s episode of "The Readout LOUD": Why have so many Americans lost trust in science? And how have our policy leaders fueled that mistrust? We speak to STAT’s new trust-in-science reporter Nicholas Florko about the impact of Americans’ growing skepticism of science.

Your co-hosts also chat about a clinical update from UniQure on its gene therapy for Huntington’s disease, a juicy lawsuit filed by the gene-editing company Beam Therapeutics against a Chinese competitor, and a shift in the way pharma companies like Novo and Eli Lilly are talking about their GLP-1 products.

"The Readout LOUD" is going international this week.

STAT's Jason Mast joins the podcast from Shanghai, where he's digging into what the rise of Chinese drug development means for the biotech industry. The hosts also speak to colleague Margaret Manto about Heidi Overton, the president's pick to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Will the new nominee bring some needed stability or controversy to the troubled agency?

For more on Overton and her views on China, go here; to read about the ITM and Telix merger, go here; you can find the latest news on osteoporosis here.