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A federal crackdown on overprescribing controlled substances via telehealth is causing confusion and consternation in the behavioral health community over an in-person prescribing requirement for drugs used to treat pain and opioid use disorder. (Moreno, 3/3)

The huge spending bill that became law last December also included fixes to a problem that has dogged the Food and Drug Administration for years. Drugmakers could get fast approval for certain drugs — with preliminary data — on the promise that they would do more research after the fact to make sure the drugs worked. But companies were often slow to follow through on these so-called accelerated approvals, leaving patients uncertain about their medicines. (Lupkin, 3/3)

KHN: Eli Lilly Slashed Insulin Prices. This Starts A Race To The Bottom.

When drugmaker Eli Lilly announced Wednesday it will slash the list price for some of its insulin products following years of criticism from lawmakers and activists that the price of the lifesaving hormone had become unaffordable, the news raised questions about what will happen to other efforts to provide low-cost insulin. Civica, a nonprofit drugmaker based in Utah, for example, has said it plans to begin selling biosimilar insulin for roughly $30 per vial by 2024 — $5 more than the new price of Eli Lilly’s generic insulin. (Sable-Smith and Young, 3/2)

A futuristic vaccine to prevent Alzheimer’s disease is in the works right here in Southern California. And it won’t even involve needles. Researcher Michael Agadjanyan at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach, along with David Sultzer from UCI MIND and Lon Schneider from USC, received a $12 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to support clinical trials aiming to keep “the long goodbye” at bay. (Sforza, 3/2)

Next week, hundreds of scientists from around the world will convene in London for an international summit on genome editing. That technology, which enables scientists to easily excise, alter, or replace specific sections of DNA, was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. But the last time an event like this took place, in November 2018, carefully planned discussions about how it might be responsibly harnessed to treat genetic diseases were derailed by news that a team of researchers in China claimed to have already crossed a bright-red scientific rubicon — they’d used it to create the world’s first gene-edited children. (Molteni, 3/3)

The other day, Melanie Carlson took her 5-year-old daughter shopping for a bathing suit. Since they couldn’t find a suit in the first store, they stopped by a second. Then, Carlson drove them to a third store, acutely aware, the whole time, that this mundane afternoon would have been nearly impossible for her to experience less than a year earlier. (Roberts, 3/2)