A new program just helped 50 participants shed more than 40 pounds each, get off nearly 100 prescriptions, and save roughly $83,000 in medication and care costs over one year. The program — focused on improving participants’ metabolic health — offered a clear glimpse of what’s possible when we address America’s health crisis at its root.
Today, one in three American adults suffers from metabolic syndrome — a condition marked by obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, low cholesterol, and too many triglycerides in the blood. It underlies many chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and cardiovascular disease, and it sharply increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Universities may look like quiet enclaves of students and stately buildings, but their labs are some of the most productive engines of innovation in the country. The discoveries made there ripple far beyond campus — improving medical care, advancing national security, and launching entire industries.
That pathway from lab to marketplace exists because of an effective law: the Bayh-Dole Act.
Co-sponsored by former Indiana senator Birch Bayh and Robert Dole of Kansas, the law gives universities the ability — and aligns their interests with potential private sector partners — to protect and license inventions made with federal research funding. The results are all around us. Google’s search algorithm, key cryptocurrency technologies, and several breakthrough cancer medicines all trace back to federally-funded research.
Pennsylvania researchers are spearheading some of the world’s most promising medical and other technological advances.
University of Pennsylvania scientists helped develop a personalized cancer immunotherapy that programs a patient’s own immune cells to kill tumors, while other UPenn researchers made the groundbreaking mRNA discoveries behind the Covid-19 vaccines. University of Pittsburgh scientists recently pioneered better ways to diagnose breast cancer and Alzheimer’s. Carnegie Mellon engineers, meanwhile, made breakthroughs on autonomous driving technology that have since been further developed by Ford and Volkswagen, and their computer science graduates are among the most highly sought after new hires.
But now, the Commerce Department is floating a proposal that would impede the commercialization of university researchers’ most compelling discoveries from ever reaching American patients and consumers.
President Donald Trump is wasting no time completing the ambitious goals left unfinished after his first term.
Soon, he’ll have a rare opportunity to complete another critical piece of unfinished business: ending the exploitation of U.S. businesses by our two largest trading partners, Canada and Mexico.
In the coming months, the United States will undertake a scheduled review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA — the landmark trade deal reached during President Trump’s first term. During that review, the administration will have the chance to restore crucial intellectual property protections that Democrats insisted be dropped after the deal was first negotiated.
I was involved in the negotiation of the USMCA as President Trump’s deputy U.S. trade representative. The president’s goal was to replace the disastrous North American Free Trade Agreement with a modern pact that would protect American workers, innovators, and businesses. A central part of that was strengthening intellectual property protections.
Yet before the deal could take effect, Democrats in Congress stripped out several key protections. For example, we had secured commitments from Mexico and Canada to provide 10 years of regulatory data protection for certain new medicines. Regulatory data protection provides temporary protection for the confidential information that drug developers share with authorities to prove a medicine is safe and effective before it can be sold. House Democrats led efforts to remove this provision, claiming that stronger protections would raise drug prices.
That’s nonsense. The United States already provides 12 years of regulatory data protection, so the change wouldn’t have altered the U.S. market. Removing it has only allowed Canadian and Mexican firms to more easily copy U.S.-made drugs.
Democrats weakened other key IP protections negotiated as part of USMCA, opening the door for Canada and Mexico to undercut U.S. innovators.
Mexico’s failures are especially troubling. In the U.S. trade representative’s most recent Special 301 Report — an annual report spotlighting foreign IP violations — Mexico was placed on the Priority Watch List for “long-standing and significant” concerns, including rampant counterfeiting and piracy.
And Canada has its own shortcomings. It is on the Special 301 Watch List and continues to impose drug price controls that undervalue American-made medicines and exacerbate foreign free-riding on U.S. innovation.
By fixing prices below market value, Canada — like many wealthy nations — forces companies to absorb losses abroad, making it harder to fund new research and pushing a greater share of costs onto American patients. President Trump is actively working to resolve this imbalance as part of lowering drug prices for U.S. patients — and fixing the USMCA is an important place to start.
The needed reforms are straightforward. Create enforceable, verifiable standards mandating respect for IP. Restore the 10-year regulatory data protection standard originally negotiated as part of the USMCA in 2018. Require Canada to abandon price controls and devote a higher, fairer level of spending to new drug development. And enforce full compliance with existing requirements.
The Trump administration now has the opportunity to finish the job it started in the first term on IP protection under the USMCA. For the sake of American workers and innovators, it must not let this opportunity go to waste.
Ambassador Jeffrey Gerrish served as the deputy U.S. trade representative for Asia, Europe, the Middle East and industrial competitiveness from 2018 to 2020. This piece originally appeared in Newsweek.
Dewey’s a community project. He’s our resident accident-prone guy who managed to get his dad’s pickup stuck in the county’s only mud hole during a six-year drought, release 300 steers from the feedlot onto the interstate, and create about a ton of tossed salad with hot oil dressing on the on ramp. Quite a few of us have scratched our heads over helping Dewey find something he could do without causing widespread destruction.
Last year, at Doc’s suggestion, Dewey fixed up his dad’s pickup and became what Doc later called an “entre-manure,” by taking manure from feedlots and the dairy and delivering it as fertilizer to people’s gardens. The problem is, no one needs fertilizer in their gardens in winter.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.
As a practicing cardiologist for more than 20 years, I’ve watched patients do everything “by the book.” They eat according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and still see their weight climb, blood pressure rise, and heart health deteriorate.
The problem isn’t their effort. It’s the guidance, which promotes high-carb, low-fat diets that can actually worsen heart disease. Many assume that by following the government’s recommendations they can improve their health. Too often, the opposite is true.
For millions of women, TikTok has become a doctor’s office: Scroll through the app and you’ll see endless videos about menopause, joint pain, hormone therapy – featuring no small amount of pseudoscience. Though misguided, this digital quest for medical knowledge is only a symptom of a larger issue: Medicine has left women with too few answers to far too many questions about their health.
While women make up half of the U.S. population, female-specific conditions account for just 5% of all biopharmaceutical research spending. And only 1% of that goes toward non-cancer female conditions, such as menopause and infertility. Chronic underinvestment has left glaring gaps in our understanding of women’s health – with real consequences for the quality of pain assessment, diagnosis and treatment.
Fifteen years ago, I noticed something different about my two-year-old daughter, Sammy’s walk. She had a noticeable sway in her hips, a little diva move that seemed more cute than concerning. But when she struggled to keep up in gymnastics and dance, we took her to a physical therapist. After months of sessions, the therapist made a quiet suggestion that changed everything: “It would be nice to have a diagnosis.”
That comment launched a journey no parent imagines. After undergoing genetic testing, only possible because we enrolled in a study at the National Institutes of Health, Sammy was diagnosed with Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy Type 2I/R9, an ultra-rare muscle-wasting disease.
Today, Sammy is 17 — and working hard to be able to walk across the stage at her high school graduation next spring. Whether kids like Sammy can achieve their dreams depends on whether Congress renews the Pediatric Priority Review Voucher (PPRV) program, which expired in December 2024. Continue reading “My Daughter Just Wants To Walk at Graduation. Congress Can Help.”→
Picture a world where most life-saving medicines are discovered not in the United States, but in Beijing and Shanghai. Imagine a time when the most advanced biotechnologies — therapies that cure cancer and Alzheimer’s, protect us from pandemics and fuel our economy — are controlled not by America, but by our chief global adversary. That is the future we risk drifting into soon if we do not act now to secure and advance American dominance in biotechnology.
Today, America still leads the world in biotechnology. But China is fast closing the gap and is close to overtaking us. Chinese dominance in biotechnology would have dire, even existential, consequences for our economy and our national security. It would leave Americans dependent on an authoritarian rival for critical medicines, giving China and its allies tremendous global influence.
During former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign, you chastised “the brothers” for what you perceived as their reluctance to vote for a black female. You said: “We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all corners of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
Did you tell “the brothers” who, for the sake of racial solidarity, you tried to shame into voting for Harris that you only believe in left-wing racial solidarity?
