By Daniel Payne, Carmen Paun, Erin Schumaker and Evan Peng

A kind word is just a press of a button away. | AFP via Getty Images

AI is coming to mental health care in the U.S., aiming to stretch therapists’ work and make it more effective.

Psychotherapy company Limbic, which already works with the U.K.’s National Health Service, is bringing its AI therapy assistant to the U.S.

How does it work? Limbic’s chatbot, which the company says is the first of its kind in America, works through an app on a patient’s phone — in conjunction with a human clinician.

Patients can send messages to the bot about what they’re thinking and feeling, and the bot follows therapy protocols in responding — using artificial intelligence and a separate statistical model to ensure the responses are accurate and helpful.

A therapist provides input for the AI to guide its conversations. And the AI reports back to the therapist with notes from its chats, better informing the patient’s future therapy sessions.

“This is allowing the human therapists to stretch a little bit further,” said Ross Harper, the founder and CEO of the company, emphasizing the bot isn’t delivering treatment but making it more effective. “It’s going to support me 24-7 out in the real world … maybe while I’m waiting for treatment, maybe in between sessions.”

The backstory: The company received medical device approval in the U.K., where more than 200,000 patients have used it.

The company is exploring FDA approval in the U.S.

Its entry into the American market comes with a $7 million round of funding, led by Khosla Ventures, and Limbic has lined up U.S. providers who’ll work with the company.

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Drugmakers worry an EU plan to boost rare disease research will Distort Market Forces. | George Frey/Getty Images

Convincing drugmakers to research treatments for rare diseases is a hard sell, European leaders are finding.

Those leaders are looking at providing incentives for pharmaceutical companies that seek cures for unmet medical needs as part of a planned overhaul of the EU’s drug policies, POLITICO’s Carlo Martuscelli reports.

But drugmakers across the pond are balking, complaining the plan could distort market forces and misallocate precious research funds.

What’s the plan? A draft put forward by the European Commission earlier this year would set up an incentive structure to reward drugmakers who tackle basic unmet medical needs and high unmet medical needs for rare diseases that affect fewer than 1 in 2,000 people.

The European Medicines Agency would decide which new drugs qualify and grant them either six months or a year of additional protection from competition.

Why it matters: A 2020 review found that 95 percent of rare diseases in the EU have no treatment options.

Industry responds: Alexander Natz of the European Confederation of Pharmaceutical Entrepreneurs — the lobby group for small and mid-sized drugmakers — said the risk was that once a drug wins the unmet needs designation, it could discourage other firms from competing.

Natz also said that because a drugmaker would only receive the unmet needs designation once the drug is approved, investors would risk a rival beating them to the finish line. That uncertainty would dampen the incentive to pursue new cures.

Christian Deleuze, deputy managing director for innovation at drugmaker Sanofi, said he feared regulators would use the creation of a favored category of drugs to reduce how much they pay for others.

“Is the idea to incentivize those who are trying to reach diseases with high unmet need, or is it a way to look at how to reduce, artificially in a way, the perception of the value brought by part of the products?” he asked.

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There's new hope that ending polio is within reach. | Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

The European Union and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are putting more money into the fight against polio as the world aims to make the paralyzing disease the second one to be eradicated, after smallpox.

“If we succeed in polio, the world will have the guts and the will to go after measles and malaria,” Bill Gates said at an event in Brussels this week, announcing nearly $1.2 billion in joint funding with the European Investment Bank and the European Commission.

The money will pay for polio vaccinations for 370 million children every year, as well as vaccine and drug research, POLITICO’s Ashleigh Furlong reports.

Reality check: The World Health Organization planned to have polio eradicated by 2000.

Two decades later, the wild poliovirus remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where war or unrest have made vaccination campaigns challenging.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world that used an oral vaccine containing a trace of a weakened form of the virus, a vaccine-derived poliovirus is circulating. That doesn’t mean that people who get vaccinated get polio. But they do excrete minute traces of the virus, which can reach the water supply and sometimes mutate. People who aren’t vaccinated can then get infected.

That happened in New York last year, prompting the state to declare an emergency and launch a vaccination campaign.

The World Health Organization approved a new oral vaccine that doesn’t pose the same risk in 2020, raising hope that elimination of the virus is still possible.

But vaccination campaigns will need to reach people in remote and war-torn areas who are facing myriad health challenges.

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