A new talc lawsuit

Could every woman get free cancer screening from Johnson & Johnson? That seems to be the implication from a new lawsuit. It’s asking that the company pay for medical monitoring for any woman who might develop cancer and who used J&J talcum powder.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday, opens new tab in New Jersey federal court, is the first to seek medical monitoring, or regular testing meant to catch cancer early, on behalf of talc users. The proposed class could include thousands of women, but would not include the more than 61,000 people who have already filed personal injury lawsuits over J&J’s talc.

With a huge number of people having used baby powder for, well, forever, that sounds like a class that’ll expand quickly — and all over a cancer connection that’s far from proven.

A leap for HIV PrEP

HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs are pretty good at reducing the chance of getting an HIV infection, but now Gilead may have taken it a step further.

A phase-3 trial of its twice-yearly HIV PrEP drug lenacapavir showed zero infections. None. Nada. That trial was conducted on more than 5,300 girls and women aged 16 to 25, and “no infections happened during the trial period among more than 2,000 women in the lenacapavir group.”

The good thing about lenacapavir is that it’s already FDA approved — it’s Sunlenca, and it’s used to treat some treatment-resistant HIV infections. Now it seems to have found a second calling as a PrEP drug.

Short Takes

Pot makes Covid worse

Using marijuana seems to increase your chances of having severe Covid-19, according to a new study out of Washington University School of Medicine — and that’s after “accounting for cigarette smoking, vaccination status, two or more co-existing diseases, and other risk factors.”

Menthol is back

The FDA has approved the first menthol e-cigarettes for sale: four products from Philip Morris Altria’s NJOY. That means the agency bought the cigarette company’s contention that vaping can help people quit smoking, rather than the alternative view that flavors get more people to start vaping.

Zepbound vs. sleep apnea

According to a year-long study of 469 apnea sufferers, Lilly’s weight loss drug “led to a significant decrease in the number of breathing interruptions during sleep.” What wasn’t clear is whether the drug affected sleep apnea directly, or if the reduction in breathing interruptions was due to weight loss. Either way, it’s another trick in the GLP-1 playbook.

[T]hose on tirzepatide — the active ingredient in Zepbound — improved to the point where CPAP might not be necessary, the researchers said, noting that existing data strongly indicated drug therapy that targets both sleep apnea and obesity delivers greater benefits rather than treating either condition separately.

Teeny correction

The other day we referred to Eli Lilly and Ozempic, but it’s Novo Nordisk that makes Ozempic — Eli Lilly’s lawsuits happen to be the ones getting the bigger media coverage. Sorry about the mixup.

Coffee consumption questions

Is coffee good for you? An international group of researchers aimed to find out by conducting yet another coffee study.

This one was based on information from 23 and Me^* and the ginormous UK Biobank database and after trying to tease out any actual correlations or definitive connections, they found, well, not much: “The answer is not definitive.” (That’s in part, they say, because Americans put of a lot of milk and sugar in their coffee, while the Brits — for unfathomable reasons — drink a lot of instant coffee and use less embellishment.)

But!

The study did find some interesting genetic correlations by using that 23 and Me data, including information on coffee consumption.

“We used this data to identify regions on the genome associated with whether somebody is more or less likely to consume coffee,” the lead author explained. “And then identify the genes and biology that could underlie coffee intake.”

So yes, there literally is a gene that controls how much coffee someone wants to consume.

^* What, you thought your personal info was kept private? You sweet summer child. 

The Long Read: Everything PBMs edition

The New York Times has what might be the definitive explanation and take-down of PBMs so far. Check out “The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugs.”