AI Tools Are Spreading Medical Scams Online

In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at AI medical scams, using machine learning to derive drugs from nature, Summit Therapeutics’ miss, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.

Beware of online medical scams. Fake AI doctors—some stealing real doctors’ faces and voices—are hawking dubious healthcare products online.

Last week, the New York Times delved into the ways scammers are using increasingly prevalent AI tools to create likenesses of real medical doctors to promote “liquid pearls” for weight loss and high-dose (potentially dangerous) supplements. An earlier CBS News investigation found dozens of accounts and more than 100 videos in which fictitious doctors—some using real ones’ identities—gave medical advice or sold dubious products. Digital risk protection company BrandShield said its research had discovered a global scam network selling fake GLP-1 weight loss drugs and other treatments by impersonating both real doctors and healthcare groups such as the American Diabetes Association and the Mayo Clinic.

While the FDA and other government agencies, as well as advocacy groups, have warned repeatedly about counterfeit and fraudulent treatments and supplements being sold online, it’s become an endless game of whack-a-mole. Promotions of dubious health products online were a problem long before AI. But because AI scammers need only a LinkedIn profile or voice snippet to generate convincing fake content, the newer scams have become even more difficult to stop.

Enveda Raises $150 Million To Use AI To Develop Drugs From Nature

Enveda CEO Viswa Colluru

Enveda

The natural world is the source of many medicines we take for granted today: aspirin comes from willow bark, penicillin from mold and statins from fungus. But finding potential new drugs from the natural world can be a long and expensive process.

Boulder, Colo.-based Enveda aims to speed this process up with AI. Its software scours data from thousands of different plants, looking for chemicals that might be useful for new treatments, which the company then refines and tests. The six-year-old startup currently has one drug, a treatment for atopic dermatitis, in early clinical trials.

Last week, Enveda raised $150 million, bringing its total funding to $517 million, at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The round was led by Premji Invest, the family office of Indian billionaire Azim Premji, founder of Wipro.

With the new capital, the company plans to bring several more drugs into clinical trials, tackling diseases that include asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and obesity. The startup also announced that Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s former chief scientific officer, joined the company’s board.

BIOTECH AND PHARMA

Summit Therapeutics lung cancer drug doesn’t seem to work as well in patients in North America and Europe as it does in China. In a study update reported on Sunday, the biotech said that patients treated with its drug, ivonescimab, and chemotherapy saw 33% reduced risk of tumor progression versus chemotherapy and a placebo, an outcome that failed to reach statistical significance. That compares with a 45% reduction for participants in China, and is a tough result for Summit, which garnered attention last year when it beat Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda in an earlier study. Its shares fell 25% on the results on Monday. Forbes previously profiled Summit’s co-CEO Maky Zanganeh.

Plus: Novartis agreed to buy Tourmaline Bio for $1.4 billion, a premium of nearly 60% the biotech’s closing price on Monday, in order to gain a new heart drug and revitalize its cardiovascular pipeline. The patent on the company’s blockbuster drug for heart failure, Entresto, is set to expire soon.

DIGITAL HEALTH AND AI

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly launched Tunelab this week, an AI platform for drug discovery trained on the company’s own data, which will be offered to select biotechs in exchange for training data. The company said that Tunelab will be hosted by a third-party to prevent Lilly from having direct access to any of its partners’ proprietary information. Circle Pharma, announced Tuesday that it would use the platform in conjunction with its own software to discover potential cancer treatments using currently undruggable targets. Insitro, meanwhile, will partner with Lilly to build new AI models for the discovery of small molecule therapies.

MEDTECH

The FDA approved a clinical trial of genetically modified pig kidneys in human transplant cases for late-stage kidney disease. The study, by xenotransplant startup eGenesis, will test the safety, tolerability and efficacy of the kidney at 24 weeks after being transplanted into older patients who are on dialysis, are facing end-stage kidney disease or are on the transplant list. The Cambridge, Mass.-based startup’s kidneys have been transplanted into three patients so far, one of whom remains healthy seven months post-operation. Forbes profiled the company and its technology last year.

PUBLIC HEALTH AND HOSPITALS

Employees should expect higher health care costs next year, including increases in premiums, bigger deductibles and higher copays, according to a large survey of employers by benefits consultant Mercer. Employers’ total health benefit cost per employee is forecast to rise 6.5% on average in 2026–the largest increase in 15 years–while the majority of employers surveyed said they planned to cut their own costs by raising deductibles or reducing benefits. Without those cuts, the per-employee cost would go up nearly 9%, according to the survey. The projected increase comes as consumers are already feeling squeezed by higher costs.

Plus: President Trump signed an executive order tightening restrictions on drug ads. The FDA said it will send thousands of letters to pharmaceutical companies, including 100 cease and desists, to enforce the new rules.

WHAT WE’RE READING

BioZorb breast implants, used to help patients with cancer, were supposed to dissolve. When they didn’t, patients were left with searing pain, dying breast tissue and infections. The implants’ maker kept those complaints from the public.

As HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sows distrust of vaccines and dismantles the federal infrastructure for them, states are making up their own rules.

Two former top NIH officials filed whistleblower complaints alleging they were illegally fired for objecting to grant cancellations and political interference in the agency’s decisionmaking.

Covid hospitalizations in California have doubled as vaccine access in the state tightened.

Florida’s surgeon general told CNN that he had not weighed the cost of eliminating vaccine mandates in the state, which scientists estimate could lead to hundreds of thousands of cases of measles and other preventable infections.

A new study of patients who stopped GLP-1 drugs found that most sustained at least some weight loss after two years and more than 50% either stayed at their lower weight or lost more.

Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, is cutting 9,000 jobs as its growth–and stock price–have slumped.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is considering adding seven more people to the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, several of whom are highly critical of COVID vaccines–including two who previously called for the FDA to revoke their approval.

HHS is rolling out ChatGPT to its employees and encouraging its use. Note: when Forbes prompted it with the question “Are COVID vaccines effective?” ChatGPT replied “Short answer: yes–especially for preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death.”