There’s a man named Mark who can control an iPad with his thoughts. Others will soon join him, thanks to a new partnership between Apple and Synchron. It’s the latest step forward for a field that a 2024 Morgan Stanley report suggests could eventually grow to $400 billion in total market share.

The brain-computer interface company published a video Monday showing Mark, who has ALS, lying on a bed while he flicks through various applications on the device. In May, Apple announced a new protocol that would help companies such as Synchron and Neuralink link a person’s device with their phone or a computer. The device works via a stent threaded into a vein in the brain’s motor cortex. The electrodes pick up brain activity and send it to a small computer before beaming it via Bluetooth to the phone.

While not as flashy as Neuralink’s demo of an implantee playing Counterstrike, Mark clicking through applications on an iPad is much more in line with what people with disabilities say they want out of a brain-computer interface: increased independence and communication abilities. — Rose Broderick

NEUROLOGY

This AI tool to diagnose dementia aims to take doctors ‘out of the equation’

Mayo Clinic has been all in on AI since 2019, when it started investing heavily in the technology and established a 10-year cloud partnership with Google. In its neurology department, that vision folded into the development of a new tool called StateViewer that aims to help neurologists distinguish between nine types of dementia. This year, they made the call to roll it out to all of Mayo’s practices — from its big campuses of specialists to its community and rural practices.

“It really does delete my expertise,” said neurologist David Jones, who directs Mayo’s Neurology AI program and developed the tool. “I’ve made myself less useful.”

The next step, they say, is commercialization. But like all AI developed within the confines of an academic medical center, there are looming questions about how it can perform in different care settings. Read more about the tool from STAT’s Katie Palmer.

Singing from the same hymn sheet

Casey Ross, with some help from me, writes about how MAGA social media influencers seemed to have joined forces with a dark money group to defeat legislation aimed at ending a business practice that large private Medicare Advantage insurers use to get the federal government to pay them more for covering seniors.

When Republicans were debating how to pay for Trump’s tax cuts, they briefly considered cracking down on upcoding in Medicare Advantage.

A MAGA social media influencer with nearly a million followers on X took a sudden interest in that news, attacking Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) who was pushing those MA reforms.

In addition to calling Cassidy names and accusing him of undermining President Trump, the influencer praised Medicare Advantage in nearly identical language to that found on the website of the dark money group Medicare Advantage Majority.

Other MAGA influencers piled on, and the proposal was quickly dropped. Read more about how Republican lawmakers feel about this phenomenon.

GLP-1s

Novo and Hims seem to give conflicting accounts on compounding demand

Telehealth company Hims & Hers reported last night that it brought in $545 million in the second quarter, falling a bit short of the $551 million expected by analysts polled by Visible Alpha. The company’s quarter-to-quarter revenue also fell for the first time. Its stock plunged more than 10% in post-market trading.

On an earnings call, CFO Yemi Okupe said the company has seen declining sales of compounded GLP-1 treatments. (Compounded copies of branded drugs are no longer allowed since the branded drugs aren’t in shortage, but Hims has argued it’s still legal to make “personalized” compounded products.)

Elsewhere, though, Novo Nordisk has blamed “the persistent use” of compounded drugs for blocking wider usage of its branded treatment Wegovy. Last week, it slashed its growth outlook for the year, leading its stock to tumble more than 20% in a day.

from AXIOS:

Medical orgs bumped from vaccine working groups

By Tina Reed