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Telehealth providers treating opioid use disorder, ADHD, and women’s health issues say the sector is in a state of frustration and chaos as the pandemic-era flexibilities that allowed their businesses to thrive are set to end with no new rules in sight. With just months to go before the ability to prescribe controlled substances online dramatically changes overnight, the vacuum of information is forcing them to devote significant energy preparing for the unknown. Companies have hired former regulatory officials to understand how hypothetical policies might impact them, and made backup plans based on speculative, third-hand sketches of proposed rules that might replace virtual prescribing flexibilities that began during the pandemic. (Palmer, Ravindranath and Aguilar, 10/10)

Inflation is easing across much of the economy. For healthcare? Not yet. The cost of employer health insurance rose 7% for a second straight year, maintaining a growth rate not seen in more than a decade, according to an annual survey by the healthcare nonprofit Â鶹ŮÓÅ. The back-to-back years of rapid increases have added more than $3,000 to the average family premium, which reached roughly $25,500 this year. (Evans, 10/9)

Over the past decade, there has been a clear and unprecedented exodus of young life scientists from academia and into lucrative industry jobs. But new data provide evidence that this trend is slowing, at least for now. The latest numbers from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, an annual National Science Foundation census of freshly minted Ph.D. graduates, show that 61.6% of biomedical scientists who had a job lined up were bound for industry in 2023. That’s a sizable dip from 66.5% in 2022, breaking a decade-long trend of nearly continuous annual increases in the share of graduates headed for the private sector. (Wosen, 10/10)

Medical equipment maker Illumina (ILMN.O) announced on Wednesday its new series of smaller, low-cost benchtop gene sequencers, to make sequencing accessible to more research and testing labs. New generation sequencers, like Illumina's MiSeq devices, help determine the sequence of DNA or RNA to study genetic variation associated with diseases and diagnose rare genetic conditions. ... The new MiSeq i100 systems can be placed on benchtops, allowing smaller labs, which typically outsource gene sequencing, to have these capabilities in-house. (Singh and Satija, 10/9)

Shares of GSK (GSK.L) rose as much as 6.5% on Thursday after the British drugmaker agreed to pay up to $2.2 billion to settle lawsuits in the United States that claimed its discontinued heartburn drug Zantac caused cancer. The agreement, announced on Wednesday, was far lower than some analyst estimates, including JP Morgan's projection of $3.5 billion. The settlement resolves 80,000 or 93% of the pending cases against the company in the U.S. (10/10)

A federal judge on Wednesday signed-off on a plea agreement resolving charges against Magellan Diagnostics that it concealed a malfunction in its lead-testing devices that led to thousands of patients receiving inaccurately low results. U.S. District Judge Patti Saris in Boston accepted the plea agreement and imposed a sentence requiring Magellan to pay $32.7 million, a portion of the overall $42 million it agreed to pay as part a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice whose "unusual" terms Saris had previously questioned. (Raymond, 10/9)

Electronic health record giant Epic and startup Particle Health have agreed to a resolution put forward by a national interoperability nonprofit caught in the middle, but the dispute will continue playing out in a federal court. Both sides expressed satisfaction with the resolution developed by Carequality, an industry stakeholder group aiming to increase interoperability between vendors, clinics, hospitals and third-party health tech companies. (Turner, 10/9)

Former Pfizer (PFE.N) CEO Ian Read and ex-CFO Frank D'Amelio said they will not be involved with activist investor Starboard Value, which reportedly wants the U.S. drug giant to make changes to turn its performance around. "We have decided not to be involved in the efforts of Starboard Value regarding Pfizer," the executives said in a statement on Wednesday, which was issued by Guggenheim Partners, an advisor to Pfizer. (10/10)