InnovationRx: Mark Cuban’s Focusing On His Drug Company; Plus: Covid Cases On The Rise

InnovationRx is your weekly digest of healthcare news. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here . B illionaire Mark Cuban is juggling a bunch of projects, but now tells Forbes that he plans to pull back on many of them: including possibly his TV show, Shark Tank .

What’s the impetus for that pullback? So he can focus on his healthcare company, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, which currently offers steep discounts on over 350 different generic medications. The company can offer low prices by bypassing many of the pharmaceutical industry’s middlemen and buying directly from factories. Cuban has so far invested over $100 million in the business and is willing to spend more.

“If we get this right, this will be the most impactful thing I’ve ever done,” he says. The award, which he shares with two others, is for a set of discoveries in the 1970s that form the basis for new drug treatments today. Other awards were granted for Johns Hopkins Covid dashboard and non-invasive genetic screening.

Read more here. Bionic Clothing : San Francisco-based clothing company Cionic announced it raised a $12. 5 million series A for its garments that provide electrical stimulation to lower limb muscles for people whose neural pathways have been damaged by strokes, injury and other conditions.

Precision Medicine: Biotech company Sudo Biosciences announced a $37 million series A round geared towards advancing its precision anti-inflammatory therapies through the clinical process. AI For Lung Cancer: Oxford-based medical technology company Optellum has announced a $14 million series A to further develop its AI platform geared towards diagnosing and treating early-stage lung cancer. The 2023 Breakthrough Prizes included an award to two scientists from DeepMind for developing AlphaFold , the company’s AI engine that predicts the 3D-structure of proteins, which is being used in lots of biotech research.

An exclusive Forbes poll found that one in five manufacturing companies have changed their strategy on where to locate company facilities based on restrictive state abortion laws since Roe was overturned. The White House on Friday announced $1. 5 billion in funding to tackle the nation’s opioid epidemic .

One possible weapon to tackle that epidemic? Medical cannabis , which a new survey suggests could be a viable substitute for effective, but highly-addictive, opioids often used for pain relief. People vaccinated against monkeypox were 14 times less likely than those who were not vaccinated to contract the disease, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday. A s the temperatures are dropping , Northern Europe’s Covid cases and hospitalization rates are on the rise .

What does this mean for Americans? In the past, Covid trends in the U. S. have closely followed those of Europe.

The United Kingdom saw a 13% spike in cases and a 17% spike in hospitalizations. Belgium has reported a 17% increase in cases and 4% increase in hospitalization between the second and third week of September, and in Belgium, cases have risen by 6%. Colder weather increases the coronavirus’ ability to survive in harsh conditions, meaning that this rise in cases and hospitalizations may very well persist for months to come.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new vaccine booster that protects against the latest variant of Covid-19, BA. 5. It came out very quickly, which has some people asking if it’s safe.

It is, and here’s why. Read more here. A new study published in JAMA Network found that children who have had Covid are 72% more likely to develop type 1 diabetes than those who haven’t.

In partnership with Global Fund, Pfizer has begun shipping six million treatments of Paxlovid , its Covid-19 antiviral drug, to 132 low-and-middle-income countries. As a result of Covid-19, more schools are allocating funds to social and emotional learning , with 88% of the country’s largest school systems reporting this spending. However, controversy surrounds SEL such as its role in Florida’s recent ruling to reject dozens of textbooks from classrooms.

According to a new study published in Biology Methods and Protocols , patients with degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia are more likely to die from Covid-related symptoms than those with other pre-existing conditions. Sexual Predators Are Grooming Young Teens On Wattpad, A Storytelling App Beloved By Gen Z Crypto Darling Helium Promised A ‘People’s Network. ’ Instead, Its Executives Got Rich.

California’s Water Emergency: Satisfying The Thirst Of Almonds While The Wells Of The People That Harvest Them Run Dry ‘It is sinking us even further’: STI clinics, already stretched thin, strain under weight of monkeypox response (Stat) Long COVID Has Forced a Reckoning for One of Medicine’s Most Neglected Diseases (The Atlantic) These scientists traced a new coronavirus lineage to one office — through sewage (Nature).