Stat (website)

Last updated

Stat
Stat News logo.svg
Available inEnglish
Headquarters Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Owner Boston Globe Media Partners
Founder(s) John W. Henry
EditorRick Berke
URL www.statnews.com
LaunchedNovember 4, 2015;8 years ago (2015-11-04)

Stat (stylized STAT, sometimes also called Stat News) [1] is an American health-oriented news website launched on November 4, 2015, by John W. Henry, the owner of The Boston Globe . It is produced by Boston Globe Media and is headquartered in the Globe's own building in Boston. [2] [3] Its executive editor is Rick Berke, who formerly worked at both The New York Times and Politico . [4] According to Kelsey Sutton of Politico, the website is Henry's "biggest and most ambitious standalone site yet". [5] The site's name comes from the term "stat", short for statim , or "immediately"—a term that has long been used in medical contexts.

Contents

As of February 2016, it had 45 staff members. [3] On average, STAT reaches about 2.3 million unique readers every month, with over 196,000 newsletter subscribers. [6]

Impact

Notable stories Stat has broken include one about Robert Califf's research, published after then–President of the United States Barack Obama announced he would be his nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration. The site also uncovered claims made by a vitamin company to which President Donald Trump had licensed his name. The site's reporting has also inspired another presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, to return a contribution that a disgraced former pharmaceutical industry CEO made to his campaign. [1] The site has also sent multiple journalists to Colombia, Haiti, and Brazil to cover the zika outbreaks there. [3] [7] Stat began covering the Coronavirus outbreak early, starting with an article [8] by Helen Branswell on 4 January 2020. The site's early coverage led to a surge in reader traffic 4-5 times above typical volumes. [9]

Remdesivir trial leak

An April 16, 2020 article entitled "Early peek at data on Gilead coronavirus drug suggests patients are responding to treatment" [10] by Adam Feuerstein contained early, incomplete results of a University of Chicago clinical trial of the COVID-19 drug remdesivir, which were leaked to STAT without permission. [11] Shares of Gilead Sciences, the developer of remdesivir, jumped higher in after-hours trading immediately after the report was published. [12] In a statement to CNBC, a University of Chicago spokesperson said, “Partial data from an ongoing clinical trial is by definition incomplete and should never be used to draw conclusions about the safety or efficacy of a potential treatment that is under investigation." [12] Lloyd Doggett, chair of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, called for an investigation of the leak, noting that "providing information that's designed to impact the stock market is not something that is permitted under federal securities law." [11]

Related Research Articles

Gilead Sciences, Inc. is an American biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Foster City, California, that focuses on researching and developing antiviral drugs used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, influenza, and COVID-19, including ledipasvir/sofosbuvir and sofosbuvir. Gilead is a member of the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index and the S&P 500.

Cencora, Inc., formerly known as AmerisourceBergen, is an American drug wholesale company that was formed by the merger of Bergen Brunswig and AmeriSource in 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Azar</span> American attorney, businessman, lobbyist and pharmaceutical executive (born 1967)

Alex Michael Azar II is an American attorney, businessman, lobbyist, and former pharmaceutical executive who served as the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2018 to 2021. Azar was nominated to his post by President Donald Trump on November 13, 2017, and confirmed by the United States Senate on January 24, 2018. He was also chairman of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from its inception in January 2020 to February 2020, when he was replaced by Vice President Mike Pence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zydus Lifesciences</span> Indian multinational pharmaceutical company

Zydus Lifesciences Limited, formerly known as Cadila Healthcare Limited, is an Indian multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Ahmedabad, which is primarily engaged in the manufacture of generic drugs. The company ranked 100th in the Fortune India 500 list in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sofosbuvir</span> Chemical compound

Sofosbuvir, sold under the brand name Sovaldi among others, is a medication used to treat hepatitis C. It is taken by mouth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moderna</span> American biotechnology company

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galidesivir</span> Antiviral drug

Galidesivir is an antiviral drug, an adenosine analog. It was developed by BioCryst Pharmaceuticals with funding from NIAID, originally intended as a treatment for hepatitis C, but subsequently developed as a potential treatment for deadly filovirus infections such as Ebola virus disease and Marburg virus disease, as well as Zika virus. Currently, galidesivir is under phase 1 human trial in Brazil for coronavirus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Remdesivir</span> Antiviral drug

Remdesivir, sold under the brand name Veklury, is a broad-spectrum antiviral medication developed by the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. It is administered via injection into a vein. During the COVID‑19 pandemic, remdesivir was approved or authorized for emergency use to treat COVID‑19 in numerous countries.

Shi Zhengli is a Chinese virologist who researches SARS-like coronaviruses of bat origin. Shi directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In 2017, Shi and her colleague Cui Jie discovered that the SARS coronavirus likely originated in a population of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan. She came to prominence in the popular press as "Batwoman" during the COVID-19 pandemic for her work with bat coronaviruses. Shi was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wuhan Institute of Virology</span> Research Institute in Wuhan, Hubei, China

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which reports to the State Council of the People's Republic of China. The institute is one of nine independent organisations in the Wuhan Branch of the CAS. Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in 2018. The institute has collaborated with the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Syra Madad</span> American pathogen preparedness expert

Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.

Trudie Lang is a Professor of Global Health Research at the University of Oxford. She specialises in clinical trials research capacity building in low-resource setting, and helped to organise the trial for the drug brincidofovir during the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">COVID-19 drug repurposing research</span> Drug repurposing research related to COVID-19

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">COVID-19 drug development</span> Preventative and therapeutic medications for COVID-19 infection

COVID-19 drug development is the research process to develop preventative therapeutic prescription drugs that would alleviate the severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). From early 2020 through 2021, several hundred drug companies, biotechnology firms, university research groups, and health organizations were developing therapeutic candidates for COVID-19 disease in various stages of preclinical or clinical research, with 419 potential COVID-19 drugs in clinical trials, as of April 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caitlin Rivers</span> American emerging infectious disease epidemiologist

Caitlin M. Rivers is an American epidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting into public health decision making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solidarity trial</span> Accelerated multinational clinical trial program to identify therapies against COVID-19

The Solidarity trial for treatments is a multinational Phase III-IV clinical trial organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners to compare four untested treatments for hospitalized people with severe COVID-19 illness. The trial was announced 18 March 2020, and as of 6 August 2021, 12,000 patients in 30 countries had been recruited to participate in the trial.

Helen Branswell is a Canadian infectious diseases and global health reporter at Stat News. Branswell spent fifteen years as a medical reporter at The Canadian Press, where she led coverage of the Ebola, Zika, SARS and swine flu pandemics. She joined Stat News at its founding 2015, leading the website's coverage of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Tomáš Cihlář is a Czech biochemist known for his role in the development of remdesivir. A specialist in virology, Cihlář holds the positions of Senior Director, Biology, and Vice-President at American pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. As a student, Cihlář assisted fellow biochemist Antonín Holý in developing Viread, the primary drug used to fight HIV infection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GS-441524</span> Metabolite of remdesivir

GS-441524 is a nucleoside analogue antiviral drug which was developed by Gilead Sciences. It is the main plasma metabolite of the antiviral prodrug remdesivir, and has a half-life of around 24 hours in human patients. Remdesivir and GS-441524 were both found to be effective in vitro against feline coronavirus strains responsible for feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), a lethal systemic disease affecting domestic cats. Remdesivir was never tested in cats, but GS-441524 has been found to be effective treatment for FIP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rick Bright</span> American immunologist and whisteblower

Rick Arthur Bright is an American immunologist, vaccine researcher, and public health official. He was the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) from 2016 to 2020. In May 2020, he filed a whistleblower complaint, alleging that the Trump administration ignored his early warnings about the COVID-19 pandemic and illegally retaliated against him by ousting him from his role and demoting him to a position at the National Institutes of Health. On October 6, 2020, Bright resigned from the government. On November 9 he was named a member of President-elect Joe Biden's coronavirus advisory board.

References

  1. 1 2 Folkenflik, David (November 4, 2015). "'Boston Globe' Owner Launches 'Stat News' Site Covering Life Sciences". NPR . Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  2. ↑ "About". statnews.com. Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 Clark, Anna (February 23, 2016). "Why STAT is the media startup to envy". Columbia Journalism Review . Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  4. ↑ Somaiya, Ravi (November 4, 2015). "Boston Globe Owner Set to Start Health News Website". The New York Times . Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  5. ↑ Sutton, Kelsey (November 4, 2015). "Meet 'Stat,' The Boston Globe's big bet on health news". Politico . Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  6. ↑ "Advertise With Us". STAT. Retrieved November 16, 2023.
  7. ↑ Owen, Laura Hazard (February 16, 2016). "With a quarter of its readers coming from abroad, Stat launches a daily Zika email update". Nieman Journalism Lab . Retrieved October 26, 2016.
  8. ↑ Branswell, Helen (January 4, 2020). "Experts search for answers in limited information about mystery pneumonia outbreak in China". Stat. Retrieved May 5, 2020.
  9. ↑ Tracy, Marc (March 30, 2020). "The Medical News Site That Saw the Coronavirus Coming Months Ago". The New York Times. Retrieved March 31, 2020.
  10. ↑ "Gilead data suggests coronavirus patients are responding to treatment". STAT. April 16, 2020. Retrieved July 20, 2020.
  11. 1 2 Elizabeth Cohen; Devon M. Sayers. "Congressman calls for SEC investigation into leak about possible coronavirus drug". CNN. Retrieved July 20, 2020.
  12. 1 2 Lovelace, Berkeley Jr. (April 16, 2020). "Gilead stock pops 8% after report says coronavirus drug trial shows encouraging early results". CNBC. Retrieved July 20, 2020.
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