Vitals #10

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Hi friend,

Welcome back to Future Human! I’ll keep this brief—I need to get back to studying! It’s been a busy week and weekend with JPM Healthcare approaching and CES recently finished. It feels like every tech and AI company is trying to make a mark in medicine. Let’s take a closer look and highlight what’s truly valuable for patients, alongside a few other noteworthy headlines.

To more lives saved,

Andrew, Nicholas, and Isabelle

1. Anthropic Moves into Healthcare a Week after OpenAI

Andrew’s Take

The biggest names in AI are no longer toying with the idea of healthcare or life sciences, they are all in. Anthropic has just escalated its push into healthcare with the launch of Claude for Healthcare, a HIPAA‑ready suite of tools aimed at clinicians, payers, and patients — coming only a week after OpenAI rolled out its own health‑focused AI offerings. Claude now connects to industry‑standard medical databases like CMS Coverage, ICD‑10 codes, NPI registries, and PubMed to help with prior authorizations, coding, claims work, and more, while also linking to personal health record platforms for patient‑facing queries.

Upon our initial review, it seems OpenAI’s AI is very flexible and can help with lots of tasks for doctors and hospitals, using its large ecosystem and lots of integrations. Claude, on the other hand, focuses on being very safe, accurate, and easy to trust, with connections to medical databases and coding systems to reduce mistakes. So basically, OpenAI is broad and powerful, while Claude is careful and reliable — both useful, but in slightly different ways.

I have written both on LinkedIn and here for months about the flirtation of AI’s biggest names with healthcare. Finally, they have made their dive, but in a slightly different way than I imagined. It seems both are looking to integrate into administrative and clinical workflows at the same time, not overly focusing on just one. Whether you are a patient needing help digesting your record, a physician looking for the latest research, or an administrator chasing prior authorization, the companies have released a tool for you. We now get to see which is adopted most and by who.

Keep in mind, for the clinician audience, tools like OpenEvidence continue to hold significant ground in evidence support, building on platforms like UpToDate that have long been foundational for clinical decision-making. OpenEvidence has grown rapidly as a modern medical AI search engine backed by journal partnerships. OpenAI and Anthropic have terrific products, but the field is not without competition.

2. Utah Permits AI to Prescribe/Refill Certain Medications

Andrew’s Take

Utah has become the first state in the U.S. to allow an artificial intelligence system to legally renew routine prescriptions for certain chronic medications without direct physician involvement, using a platform developed by Doctronic. Primary care physicians (PCPs) often receive between 10 and 25 refill requests per day, spending an average of 30 minutes daily just assessing and responding to these requests. In Doctronic’s eyes, automating these renewals could free up clinicians to focus on higher-value patient care, improve timely access to medications, reduce costs, and alleviate pressure on stretched PCPs — especially in rural and underserved areas where appointment wait times can be long and refill coordination is often handled by clerical staff.

In this pilot, 190 commonly prescribed drugs are eligible. Some medications, such as painkillers, injectables and ADHD drugs, are excluded. Before the launch of the system, Doctronic's data showed its AI's prescription recommendations matched those of human doctors in more than 99% of cases. Utah’s DOH is holding onto that fact tightly as it releases this system to its citizens.

Naturally, safety remains front and center. The program limits refills to non-controlled medications, patients must verify identity, and cases that don’t meet clear criteria are escalated to a human clinician. Early prescriptions in each drug class are reviewed by doctors before the system operates autonomously. Despite the safety steps, physician groups have already cautioned that completely removing doctors from the loop for clinical decisions could introduce risks. Findings in Utah will be shared publicly to inform future state and federal AI policy, creating a national model for high-stakes AI regulation in healthcare.

3. Apella Raises $80M for OR optimization with AI and Computer Vision

Andrew’s Take

It’s always fun (and frustrating?) to see an idea you had for a company or product take off before you got to it. A while ago, I was speaking with one of our deans about how important the OR was to the hospital’s bottom line, but also how vulnerable it was to bottlenecks. One or two delayed cases and things fall apart. Even a case done early does not mean the system can adjust to get more done sooner. It is just too big and cumbersome to adapt in the moment — or is it?

Apella just closed an $80 million Series B to grow its artificial intelligence platform that helps hospitals run their operating rooms more smoothly. The idea is simple but powerful: ORs are the busiest, most valuable part of a hospital, yet they’re often bogged down by workflow bottlenecks, scheduling headaches, and inefficient use of staff and space. Apella uses ambient AI and computer vision to watch what’s happening in real time, automatically spot key surgical events, and feed that data back into hospital systems — so scheduling, staffing, and turnover can be predicted and optimized without clinicians chasing paperwork or manual updates. Also, now when surgeons get bumped to a different OR pre-op, they can yell at the algorithm instead of admin.

On average, hospitals using Apella have seen surgical volume tick up by about 5 percent because they can make better use of their existing capacity. The system pulls in data from electronic records, identifies up to 14 distinct case events, and even writes info back to EHRs on its own, leaving surgical teams freer to focus on patients rather than logistics. Apella is already deployed at major centers like Houston Methodist and Tampa General and plans to use the new capital to expand into more health systems and build out its product suite. The real promise here isn’t just cool tech — it’s less admin friction, smoother OR days, and more time for clinicians to care for patients rather than chase schedules. I wrote a couple weeks ago about another health system doing this with a simple scheduling software and thoughtful brainpower. I figured somewhere out there was a company trying to automate it all. Here it is (one of a couple). Congrats to them!

4. Merck Negotiating $28–32B Acquisition of Revolution Medicines

Andrew’s Take

Merck is reportedly in talks to acquire Revolution Medicines in a deal that could be valued at up to around $30 billion, underscoring how big pharma is aggressively seeking innovation to sustain its oncology pipelines as blockbuster drugs face upcoming patent losses. 

Revolution isn’t a big commercial drug name (yet) — it’s a clinical-stage biotech built around a new class of cancer drugs called RAS(ON) inhibitors that target mutant RAS proteins, which fuel a lot of hard-to-treat tumors like pancreatic and certain lung cancers. Their lead candidate, daraxonrasib, is in late-stage (Phase 3) testing for both pancreatic cancer and non-small cell lung cancer, with data readouts expected later this year and into 2026. Other pipeline assets include mutation-specific inhibitors such as elironrasib and zoldonrasib, all still in clinical development and not yet approved.

If this goes through, this could be one of, if not the, largest pre-commercial acquisitions in biotech history. Why the steep price and urgency from Merck? Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda — one of the company’s biggest revenue drivers and a top-selling oncology therapy worldwide — is set to lose its primary patent protections in the United States in 2028, opening the door for biosimilar competition and pricing pressure. Analysts expect this will significantly impact Merck’s sales as lower-cost alternatives enter the market and negotiated government pricing begins around the same time, leading to an anticipated decline in U.S. revenue from the drug after 2028. Merck has been preparing for this shift by expanding indications, developing new formulations like a subcutaneous version, and bolstering its pipeline, but the loss of exclusivity represents one of the most significant “patent cliffs” in recent pharmaceutical history.

There remains inherent clinical risk in drugs that haven’t yet been approved, meaning rigorous trials and safety data will still be essential before these become standard options. That said, it has never been clearer just how much big pharma really needs small biotech to stay competitive.

5. EpiBiologics Scores $107M for Targeted Protein‑Degrading Cancer Drug

Andrew’s Take

To wrap up Vitals #10, and the first newsletter sent during the depths of clerkship year, we have one last biotech deal — a funding round. EpiBiologics just landed a $107 million Series B to push its next-generation cancer therapy platform toward the clinic. Providers and investors seem very interested in targeted protein degradation as a new way to fight tough-to-treat tumors. Their tech — built around its proprietary EpiTAC platform — uses bispecific antibodies to tag harmful proteins on the surface of cancer cells and send them to the cell’s internal recycling system for destruction. This is a bit different from traditional drugs that just block a protein; EpiBiologics’ approach actually removes the protein, which could lead to deeper, more durable anti-tumor effects. Their lead program, EPI-326, is designed to degrade all cancer-driving forms of EGFR, a molecule that fuels many lung, head and neck, and other solid tumors, while sparing healthy tissues — a strategy that may improve safety and reduce side effects.

The company plans to start first-in-human trials in early 2026 for patients whose disease has relapsed or failed standard therapies, and investors see this as a promising way to expand options where current drugs fall short. The fresh funding will also help EpiBiologics advance other degraders in its pipeline and scale up operations, underscoring how targeted degradation is becoming a hot area in oncology innovation. Recall my professor, Dr. Craig Crews, and his company Halda, whose PROTAC and RIPTAC technologies were recently acquired by J&J. It looks like we’ve now met a close cousin — and it’s just as promising.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Vitals!

We always appreciate feedback, questions, and conversation, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or by replying to this email.

To more lives saved,,

Andrew, Nicholas, and Isabelle