Renewing hopes of restoring the rare pediatric disease priority review voucher (RPD PRV) program that expired at the end of 2024, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 47-0 Sept. 17 to advance the Give Kids a Chance Act of 2025 (H.R. 1262), one of six pieces of legislation slated to move to the full U.S. House for consideration.

The second day’s meeting of the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) took up guidelines related to COVID-19 vaccines, of which an outspoken skeptic is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy – who in June fired all 17 members of ACIP and replaced them with names more to his liking.

Following the first approvals in the U.K., Canada, Australia and Switzerland, the EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) is now recommending approval of Bayer AG’s Lynkuet (elinzanetant), a non-hormonal treatment for symptoms of menopause. The drug, the first dual neurokinin-1 and neurokinin-3 receptor antagonist, is for the treatment of moderate to severe vasomotor symptoms, also known as hot flashes.

Two back-to-back papers published in Nature on Sept. 10, 2025, shed new light on the unexpected role of neurons in shaping the evolution of small-cell lung cancer (SCLC). It’s already known that, in gliomas, cerebral cancer cells actively damage axons, contributing to tumor progression through direct neural disruption. Comparable nerve-tumor interactions have been reported in peripheral cancers, where tumor-induced nerve disruption promotes inflammation and an immunosuppressive microenvironment linked to immunotherapy resistance.