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  • How Penn helped to rescue RHD’s Family Practice health clinics after a nonprofit ownership change

    How Penn helped to rescue RHD’s Family Practice health clinics after a nonprofit ownership change

    A year ago, leaders of Family Practice & Counseling Network feared their health clinic, which has served low-income Philadelphians for more than 30 years, wouldn’t survive past June.

    The clinic was part of Resources for Human Development, a Philadelphia human services agency that a fast-growing Reading nonprofit called Inperium Inc. had acquired in late 2024.

    As a federally qualified health clinic since 1992, the clinic had received an annual federal grant, higher Medicaid rates, and other benefits.

    But federal rules prohibited the clinic from continuing to retain that status and those benefits under a parent company. That meant Family Practice & Counseling Network had two options: close or spin out into a new entity that would reapply to be a federally qualified clinic.

    “We had to figure it out,” the organization’s CEO Emily Nichols said in a recent interview.

    At the time, the organization’s three main locations had 15,000 patients. They are “very underserved, low-income people that deserve good healthcare,” she said.

    Thanks to $9.5 million in financial and operational support from the University of Pennsylvania Health System, a new legal entity took over the clinics in July. They now operate under the tweaked name, Family Practice & Counseling Services Network, and without the federal status.

    “Penn allowed us to survive,” Nichols said.

    Still in a precarious position

    The nonprofit, with its name now abbreviated as FPCSN, remains in a precarious position.

    Because of the corporate change, the $4.2 million annual grant that Family Practice had been receiving through RHD had to be opened up for other applicants under federal law. FPCSN applied but won’t find out until March the result of the competition.

    Natalie Levkovich, CEO of the Health Federation of Philadelphia, a nonprofit that supports community health centers in Southeastern Pennsylvania, expressed confidence that the clinic will regain the funding, which helps cover the cost of caring for people who don’t have insurance.

    “FPCSN is a well-run, well-regarded, well-supported health center that has an established, high-functioning practice in multiple locations,” Levkovich said. The clinic received letters of support from all the other federal clinics in the area, she said.

    In addition to the grant, other key benefits of being a federally qualified health center — the status the clinic had for 33 years — are receiving medical malpractice insurance through the federal government and enhanced Medicare and Medicaid rates.

    A mural in a conference room at Family Practice & Counseling Services Network’s headquarters in Nicetown shows a timeline of the agency’s history since its founding in 1992.

    In return, federally qualified clinics have to accept all patients, including people without insurance. The insurance mix of FPCSN’s patient population is about 60% Medicaid, 20% uninsured, 10% Medicare, and 10% commercial, Nichols said.

    Also, half of a federal clinic’s board members have to be patients at the clinic. FPCSN has three main locations, in Southwest Philadelphia, on the western edge of North Philadelphia, and in the West Poplar neighborhood. Its revenue in fiscal 2025 was $31 million.

    During the past year, 55 FPCSN staff members have left, leaving 140 employees still at the organization, including 16 nurse practitioners who provide the primary care. The departures may have contributed to a decline in the number of patients seen to 13,500 last year, compared to 15,000 the year before, Nichols said.

    Why Penn helped FPCSN

    Federally qualified health centers form the core safety net in Philadelphia and across the nation, said Richard Wender, who chairs Family Medicine and Community Health at Penn, which had a longstanding relationship with RHD’s clinics.

    Under contract, Penn family practice physicians were providing prenatal care to 400 pregnant patients at the clinics that would have closed abruptly at the end of June if Penn hadn’t provided support. “We wanted them to be able to continue to take care of the patients that they were taking care of,” Wender said.

    The money from Penn helped pay startup costs for the new entity and bridged the period until FPCSN was able to secure new contracts with insurance companies.

    Penn also didn’t want the clinic’s patients showing up in its already busy emergency departments for basic care. “That adversely affects their health because it’s not a good place to get preventive care,” he said.

    But it was important to Penn that there was a pathway back to federal clinic status. “We feel as optimistic as we can,” Wender said.

    Wender and Nichols credited Kevin Mahoney, CEO of Penn’s health system, with the preservation of FPCSN’s services for low-income Philadelphians by throwing his full support behind the effort.

    “You have to have a CEO, a leader in your health system, who understands that this is the responsibility of large academic health centers,” Wender said.

  • Riddle EMS rebranded as Main Line Health EMS

    Riddle EMS rebranded as Main Line Health EMS

    Main Line Health on Wednesday announced that emergency medical services at Riddle Hospital in Media would be rebranded as Main Line Health EMS.

    The seven-ambulance fleet has been known as Riddle EMS for the past 40 years. It employs 77 paramedics and EMTs and provides emergency response services for Main Line’s four-hospital system.

    In addition to Riddle Hospital, Main Line Health includes Paoli Hospital, Lankenau Medical Center, and Bryn Mawr Hospital.

    The rebranding gives Main Line’s emergency services team a name that matches its system-wide mission, and “strengthens the team’s ability to meet the expanding needs of the community, while preserving the trusted service delivered for decades,” according to a statement from Main Line.

    Main Line’s hospitals, and in particular Riddle, have been strained by the closure of Crozer Health, which operated the largest emergency department and highest level trauma center in Delaware County.

    Riddle and Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, in Darby, are the next closest hospitals for people who would previously have turned to Crozer for emergency care.

    Here’s Delaware County’s plan for addressing emergency response shortages following Crozer’s closure
  • St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children announced its third leadership change in less than two years

    St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children announced its third leadership change in less than two years

    St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, a key safety-net provider in North Philadelphia, on Wednesday announced its third leadership change in less than two years.

    Claire Alminde, the hospital’s chief nursing officer and a 37-year veteran of the institution, is St. Chris’ new acting president.

    She is the third interim or acting executive appointed to the top management position at the nonprofit hospital since February 2024 and its fourth leader since 2020. Drexel University and Tower Health have owned St. Chris in a 50-50 joint venture since 2019.

    “Claire is firmly committed to St. Christopher’s mission and exemplifies the compassion, expertise and steadfast commitment that define this hospital and the care we provide to children and families across our region,” St. Chris said in an e-mailed statement.

    St. Chris’ chief nursing officer Claire Alminde has been named acting president of the North Philadelphia safety-net provider.

    There are no immediate plans for a national CEO search. “Right now, Tower’s focus is on helping Claire onboard successfully and lead the organization forward. We are grateful that Claire has committed to serving in this position as long as necessary,” Tower said.

    Alminde is replacing Jodi Coombs, who was appointed interim president and CEO last April. Coombs’ previous position was executive vice president at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, in Missouri. Before that, she worked in Massachusetts.

    Coombs replaced Robert Brooks, who was named president and interim CEO in February 2024 following the announcement that the institution’s last permanent CEO, Don Mueller, was departing for a job in Chattanooga, Tenn., closer to his family.

    Mueller took the job at St. Christopher’s in the summer of 2020, about seven months after Tower and Drexel University bought the facility, but did not permanently move to Philadelphia.

    State health officials in 2023 blamed safety lapses at the hospital on Mueller’s absence and ordered him to be in Philadelphia five days a week.

    Tower oversees day-to-day management of the facility, where about 85% of patients have Medicaid insurance for low-income people. That’s an extremely high rate.

    St. Chris, which has received significant financial support from other local healthcare institutions in recent years, has not published its financial results for the year that ended June 30, 2025. In fiscal 2024, St. Chris had a $31.6 million operating loss.

  • Jefferson and Temple join wide-ranging litigation over high insulin pricing

    Jefferson and Temple join wide-ranging litigation over high insulin pricing

    Temple University Health System and Jefferson Health are the latest area health systems to sue pharmaceutical companies and pharmacy benefit managers over high insulin pricing.

    The move follows similar lawsuits filed in recent years by the University of Pennsylvania, the city of Philadelphia, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Bucks County, as well as hundreds of other municipalities, companies, and unions around the country.

    Temple filed its suit last week, and Jefferson sued just before the new year.

    Eli Lilly, CVS Caremark, and Sanofi are among the major companies named in the suits, which accuse drugmakers and pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, of conspiring to drive up profits on diabetes drugs.

    PBMs work with drug manufacturers, insurers, and pharmacies, negotiating prices and developing formularies — lists of prescription drugs that are available on a given insurance plan.

    The health systems and other plaintiffs say drugmakers inflate prices for their insulin products in order to secure lucrative placements on formularies. Then, they pay a portion of the resulting profits back to PBMs, according to the lawsuits.

    Jefferson and Temple officials said they are paying more for employees’ insulin as a result, impacting the health systems’ budgets and hurting their ability to “provide necessary services […] to the larger Philadelphia community.”

    Representatives from both health systems declined to comment.

    Eli Lilly has worked for years to reduce out-of-pocket costs for insulin, the company said in a statement, noting that some plaintiffs filing the lawsuits are choosing higher-priced medications over more affordable options.

    Lilly capped insulin prices at $35 per month, the statement said, and in 2024 the average monthly out-of-pocket cost for its insulin was less than $15.

    CVS Caremark said pharmaceutical companies “alone are responsible” for pricing their drugs in its latest statement, released after Philadelphia officials joined the litigation last month. The company said it would welcome lower prices on insulin.

    “Allegations that we play any role in determining the prices charged by manufacturers for their products are false, and we intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit,” they wrote in an email.

    A statement from Sanofi said that the company has always complied with the law when it comes to drug prices and works to lower prices. PBMs and insurers sometimes negotiate savings on drugs, but those are “not consistently passed through to patients in the form of lower co-pays or coinsurance,” the statement read.

    “As a result, patients’ out-of-pocket costs continue to rise while the average net price of our insulins declines.”

  • The Trump administration is targeting ultra-processed foods. A Penn researcher explains why that might be complicated. | Q&A

    The Trump administration is targeting ultra-processed foods. A Penn researcher explains why that might be complicated. | Q&A

    On the same day President Donald Trump’s administration targeted ultra-processed foods in its new federal nutrition guidelines, Penn researcher Alyssa Moran published an academic journal article explaining why they’re hard to regulate.

    For starters, there’s no consensus on how policymakers should define the term, she and two coauthors said in a Nature Medicine commentary piece. (The publication timing was a coincidence, but she welcomed the attention to an underestimated challenge.)

    Ultra-processed foods are generally understood to be those with industrially produced ingredients not found in home cooking, but experts have long debated how best to classify the foods for regulation. The wording would need to encompass all the possible variations, without being so rigid that the industry finds loopholes.

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department have said they are working on developing a federal definition to provide “increased transparency to consumers about the foods they eat.” It’s a key goal of the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who blames ultra-processed foods for the United States’ “chronic disease epidemic.”

    Roughly 60% of an American child’s daily calorie intake is estimated to come from ultra-processed foods, which comprise up to 70% of the U.S. food supply. Studies have linked their consumption to a higher risk of obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and other harms.

    This is the first time U.S. dietary guidelines have explicitly called out ultra-processed foods, also called highly processed foods, and told Americans to limit consumption, Moran said. The guidance was part of a broader update by the Trump administration the first week of January that flipped the longstanding food pyramid on its head to promote consumption of whole foods, proteins, and some fats.

    Though health experts questioned changes, such as the vague guidance on drinking alcohol, the crackdown on ultra-processed foods mirrors what many health organizations and consumer advocacy groups have been saying for years.

    “I thought it was a bold move, and I was glad to see it,” she said.

    Moran talked with The Inquirer about what people should know about ultra-processed foods and the challenges that remain in regulating the products.

    This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

    Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a press briefing with leading health officials and nutrition advisors at the White House in early January.
    What are ultra-processed foods?

    It’s a term that’s been used for decades and has been used, I think, interchangeably with ‘the Western diet’ or ‘junk foods’ or ‘highly processed foods.’

    Most foods are processed in some form, whether it’s physical processing, like slicing fruit before you eat it, or adding some chemical preservatives to foods that increase food safety. What changes with ultra-processing is the intent of the processing.

    With ultra-processing, the intent isn’t just to make the food safer or to extend shelf-life. It is to make it more cosmetically appealing and more likely to be overconsumed by individuals. They’re formulated in a way that makes them addictive, and they’re also aggressively marketed.

    What does it mean to make a food ‘cosmetically appealing’?

    It’s the overall sensation of eating the product.

    Companies are manipulating levels of highly palatable ingredients like sugar, salt, and fat to be at levels that are not naturally occurring and that are extremely palatable to consumers.

    They also add additives that enhance the naturally rewarding properties of things like sugar, salt, and fat. Some additives are added to food, for example, to mask a bitter flavor or prevent an aftertaste. They also add emulsifiers to change the mouth feel of a product. They pay attention to how the product sounds — even the crunch of a product when you’re chewing it — and add dyes to make them more visually appealing, especially to kids.

    There are all kinds of strategies that can take advantage of all of the senses to make the product almost irresistible.

    Why is there so much debate over how to define the products?

    The current administration has talked more than any prior administration about potentially limiting the production, marketing and sale, and availability of ultra-processed products. So, to be able to formulate policy to limit intake of these products, we have to be able to identify them.

    Many people have proposed going down the route of defining ultra-processed foods according to a list of additives. And there are many reasons why I don’t think that’s a good approach.

    What are the reasons?

    We need to really be thinking about how companies are going to respond to whatever definition we create.

    If we use a list of specific additives that makes something ultra-processed, companies are going to look at that list and they’re going to say, ‘How can we get around this. How can we skirt regulation?’ They’re either going to increase their use of additives that exist already but aren’t on that list, or they’re going to create new additives with very similar structures and functions as the existing additives.

    We see this happen all the time with commercially regulated products. When policies tax sugar, we see that companies increase their use of non-nutritive sweeteners, so the food supply is just as sweet, if not more. When Red Dye No. 2 was banned (in 1976), companies created Red Dye No. 3, which is almost identical and was also banned (in 2025), but 50 years later.

    Plus, we have hundreds of thousands of products on the marketplace and there are constantly new ones being added. And currently under FDA policy, companies don’t even need to notify the FDA when they add new ingredients to the food supply. So we don’t even have a complete list of every single additive in the food supply right now.

    What approach did you propose in your Nature article on this topic?

    Right now, it has been proposed to use a list of ingredients that would make a food ultra-processed. Everything else is non-ultra-processed.

    Our recommendation is really to flip that.

    We would say, ‘Here are all of the ingredients that make a food non-ultra-processed. Everything else is ultra-processed.’

    There are very few additives that make a food non-ultra-processed. The purpose (of the additive) would have to be for food safety or preservation, and that’s one reason why this is also a much simpler approach. Our approach is saying, for example, your yogurt is considered non-ultra-processed if it contains things like milk, live cultures, fruit, nuts, seeds, and honey, as well as some preservatives, vitamins, and minerals.

    If it has anything else, it’s an ultra-processed food and is in scope for regulation. Then, if companies introduce new additives, they’ll still be considered ultra-processed because they still fall into the ‘everything else’ bucket.

    Are there any other challenges that you see in terms of regulating the industry?

    The biggest one is the pushback from the food industry. They spend a lot of money fighting against policies to regulate production, marketing, and sale. We see it with sweet and beverage taxes that have been enacted in Philadelphia and other places. We see it with front-of-package labeling, which the FDA had been trying to pass.

    The lack of resources at our federal agencies is another barrier. This administration, early on, really dismantled the FDA, which I think would be the main regulatory body involved in creating this definition and potentially developing policy to regulate these products.

    If we don’t have people at those agencies, and they don’t have the resources they need to do their work, you could have a law on the books, but it’s not going to go anywhere.

    What are your tips for consumers?

    Shop on the grocery store perimeter and avoid the center aisles. Avoid ingredients that aren’t familiar to you.

    Classic examples of ultra-processed foods are box macaroni and cheese, many frozen pizzas or frozen prepared meals, and many boxed cookies, candies, cakes, and packaged foods.

    I would never tell consumers in this environment that you have to avoid every single ultra-processed food to be healthy. These products are everywhere. They’re cheap. They’re super convenient. Many people don’t have access to minimally processed whole foods.

    That’s why I think policy is so important — policies that both put limits on ultra-processed foods, but also promote and incentivize the production and sale and marketing of non-ultra-processed products.

  • A new $50 million investment fund will back Penn life sciences startups

    The University of Pennsylvania, German biotech firm BioNTech, and Osage University Partners, a Bala Cynwyd venture capital firm, have formed a $50 million fund to back early-stage life sciences startups at Penn, the partners announced Friday.

    The announcement came on the eve of the much-hyped annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, which starts Monday. The conference has become a way to measure the mood of the biotech sector, which has slumped after investment peaked in 2021. It’s been particularly difficult for early-stage biotech companies to raise money in recent years, according to a recent J.P. Morgan report.

    For Penn scientists and company founders, the so-called Penn-BioNTech Innovative Therapeutics Seed Fund, or PxB Fund for short, will step into that gap. It is designed to invest in companies that are developing new therapeutics, diagnostics, and research tools.

    The announcement did not include a breakdown of how much money each of the three backers provided. Osage University Partners, which has $800 million under management and had previously invested in at least 10 Penn spinouts, will run the fund.

    “Penn has a remarkable track record of creating cutting-edge startups,” Marc Singer, an Osage managing partner, said in a statement.

    He cited two deals for Penn spinouts last year: AbbVie acquired San-Diego-based Capstan Therapeutics for up to $2.1 billion, and Kite paid $350 million for Interius BioTherapeutics, which was based at Pennovation Works in the Grays Ferry section of Philadelphia.

    Penn was among the first six universities Osage partnered with 15 years ago when it started investing in spinouts from research universities, while allowing the institutions to share in some of the profits. This was at a time when few universities were investing in their own startups.

    Penn’s evolution as an investor in its own startups

    For Penn, that began changing about a decade ago. The university’s first investment in one of its own faculty-member spinouts came in 2016, when it invested $5 million in Carl June’s Tmunity Therapeutics. In 2018, Penn Medicine agreed to invest an additional $45 million in Penn biotech companies over three years in conjunction with outside funds.

    In December, Penn announced a $10 million fund that will make seed investments of up to $250,000 in companies that have at least one founder affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. That fund is for the entire university, not just life sciences.

    PxB is another part of what John Swartley, Penn’s chief innovation officer, called in an interview Friday a “constellation of different support structures and funding sources that our companies can draw upon in order to advance their opportunities and agenda.”

    Anna Turetsky, a biotech investor in New York who received her undergraduate degree at Penn and has a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard University, has joined Osage and will serve as PxB’s general partner. She said PxB is a 10-year fund and is expected to build a portfolio of around 15 companies in the early years.

    “Part of why this is a fantastic time to start this fund is that there has been a gap in venture funding for early stage startups over the last few years. Everyone wants to see clinical data these days,“ Turetsky said. If that continues, ”then in a few years, there will be no early-stage clinical companies,” she said.

    Germany’s BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer on one of the COVID-19 vaccines that used mRNA technology developed at Penn, will use the fund to deepen its longstanding ties to Penn researchers.

    Philadelphia’s place in biotech

    Some observers of Philadelphia’s biotech sector have lamented the relative lack of local investors, which are abundant in places like Boston and San Francisco and have helped turn those metro areas into leading innovation centers.

    Quaker BioVentures was a local investment fund that raised $700 million in the early 2000s to buy into biotech firms in Philadelphia and elsewhere, but was not successful for its investors, which included Pennsylvania state pension funds.

    Others, when asked why the Philadelphia region trails Boston, San Francisco, and San Diego, as a biotech hub, point to the need for a deeper pool of management talent.

    Why Philadelphia loses promising biotech firms to Boston, San Francisco, and San Diego

    PxB could help change that, Singer said.

    “Part of our hope with the fund is to create some companies, start from scratch, take technology, find management teams, start them in Philadelphia. Hopefully, that will create a new crop of managers,” he said.

  • St. Luke’s Health Network uses AI tool to reduce cardiac arrests and ICU transfers

    St. Luke’s Health Network uses AI tool to reduce cardiac arrests and ICU transfers

    Anna Stone was doing the first rounds of her nursing shift at St. Luke’s Upper Bucks Campus when she noticed a patient’s heart rate was elevated, a sign that they could be at risk of a cardiac emergency.

    Before she could look into the patient’s chart and decide whether to call for help, a critical care doctor came rushing to the patient’s bedside.

    A drop in the patient’s oxygen levels had been detected by a monitor that uses artificial intelligence to continuously evaluate vital signs. This triggered an automatic alert for the hospital’s critical care team to send help.

    The AI tool is intended to help doctors and nurses more quickly identify patients whose condition is deteriorating — often before signs of distress are visible to medical staff — and intervene sooner.

    The approach contributed to a 34% decline in cardiac arrests, and a 12% drop in patients crashing so hard and fast that they required rapid response transfers to the ICU between 2022 and 2024, according to St. Luke’s.

    Survival rates among cardiac arrest patients rose from 24% to 36%.

    St. Luke’s experiment with a program called the Deterioration Index, created by healthcare software giant Epic, is among the latest ways hospitals are bringing artificial intelligence into their patients’ rooms.

    In other Philadelphia-area initiatives, Jefferson Health and Penn Medicine recently debuted an ambient listening tool that records conversations between doctors and patients, distilling the critical details into a well-organized visit note.

    St. Luke’s has been using its AI monitoring system across all 16 of its campuses, including Quakertown, Upper Bucks, and Grand View, which the health system acquired in July.

    The health system’s initiative was recognized by The Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, the region’s largest industry group for hospitals, with an award honoring safety and quality initiatives that improved patient care while reducing hospital costs.

    Using AI to predict emergencies

    The monitoring device, which attaches to a patient’s finger, records and continuously updates patients’ electronic medical records with vital metrics such as heart rate, blood pressure, and lab work results.

    Using this matrix of data points, it assigns each patient a “deterioration index” — a score between 0 and 100 indicating their overall stability — and automatically alerts critical care when the score rises too high.

    Matthew Zheng, a doctor at St. Luke’s Upper Bucks, holds the monitoring device used to continuously track patients’ vital signs.

    It is not intended to replace in-person monitoring, but serves as an extra set of eyes when nurses are away from their bedside.

    What’s more, the sophisticated technology is capable of picking up on nuanced changes in a patient’s status before they show physical signs of distress.

    “We would ideally like to intervene on these patients before they reach a point where the intervention isn’t that helpful,” said Matthew Zheng, a critical care doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital — Upper Bucks. “Our nurses work very hard, but they can’t be in the same room all the time.”

    When a patient’s “deterioration index” rises above 60, the device sends an alert to the hospital’s virtual response center — a remote hub where a nurse monitors three screens showing the status of all patients.

    Alerts may also be sent directly to a patient’s care team or the rapid response unit, if the AI monitoring detects that a patient is quickly deteriorating and needs emergency care.

    “What that’s allowed is for us to have a proactive response instead of being reactive to patients,” said Charles Sonday, an associate chief medical information officer at St. Luke’s who leads AI initiatives.

    Stone, the Quakertown nurse, said having the tool to constantly watch over patients while she’s out of their room is reassuring.

    Doctors like that it enables them to quickly get up to speed on the status of a patient they transferred out of the ICU, and respond more immediately to their new medical needs, said Zheng, the critical care doctor.

    St. Luke’s plans to continue fine-tuning the technology, and customize it to meet the unique patient profiles of each of its campuses, which span 11 counties and two states, from the Lehigh Valley to New Jersey.

    The social and economic factors that affect patient health, such as pollution, and illness rates, vary significantly across the health system’s sprawling network, Sonday said.

    The system will also explore customizing the tool for specialty services, such as pediatrics and behavioral health.

  • S&P downgraded ChristianaCare’s credit rating

    S&P downgraded ChristianaCare’s credit rating

    ChristianaCare, Delaware’s largest health system, received a one-notch credit-rating downgrade from Standard & Poor’s, to “AA” from “AA+’.

    S&P attributed the downgrade of the nonprofit health system’s rating to inconsistent operating performance in recent years and the planned addition of $350 million in debt early this year through a bond offering, according to a report Tuesday.

    In the year ended June 30, 2025, ChristianaCare’s financial results were weaker than expected because of low surgical volume related to physician turnover, S&P said. Another factor was higher-than-anticipated medical malpractice reserves, S&P said.

    One of ChrisitianaCare’s financial strengths is that it typically gets half of its revenue from private insurers, which pay higher rates and are more profitable than Medicare and Medicaid, S&P noted.

    Despite its strong financial condition, ChristianaCare has a relatively small service area, given its concentration in northern Delaware, compared to other health systems with “AA” ratings, S&P said. If ChristianaCare’s expansion into Southeastern Pennsylvania is successful, it would help alleviate that problem, the agency said.

    ChristianaCare opened a micro-hospital in western Chester County last summer and is building a second one in Aston, Delaware County. It also has plans to put one in Springfield Township. In addition, ChristianaCare spent $50 million to step into the leases that the bankrupt Crozer Health had at five outpatient facilities in Broomall, Glen Mills, Media, and Havertown.

    S&P said ChristianaCare has no plans for significant acute-care hospital expansion.

    Last month, ChristianaCare and Virtua Health, South Jersey’s largest health system, ended negotiations on a possible merger.

  • Penn researchers gamified walking to boost heart health, and won a $25 million grant

    Penn researchers gamified walking to boost heart health, and won a $25 million grant

    University of Pennsylvania researchers recently won a $25 million grant to see if they can fight heart disease with a game that promotes a healthy behavior — walking.

    The intervention works by tracking how many steps a person takes each day and assigning points and levels accordingly. Participants get text messages with their daily tally.

    The Penn team previously tested the concept in a clinical trial with 1,062 patients and found the approach increased participants’ activity by an average of nearly 2,000 steps daily.

    Now, with funding from the nonprofit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, they hope to show that their game cannot only promote exercise, but can also reduce the incidence of heart events.

    Dozens of studies have already shown that people who take more steps a day experience fewer heart attacks and strokes. However, these findings have largely been based on observational data, which is not proof of a cause-and-effect relationship.

    The Penn team will be using the $25 million grant to pursue the gold standard for establishing scientific causality: a randomized controlled trial. Patients will get divided into two groups — one gets to play the game, and the other does not — so researchers can compare their outcomes.

    The clinical trial involving 18,000 participants will launch in a year and a half and run for roughly five years. Patients will be recruited through a partnership with the private healthcare system Ascension, which spans 15 states and the District of Columbia.

    Scientists theorize that walking could help by reducing blood pressure, blood sugar, and inflammation. Activity may also improve the way muscles get oxygen from the blood, “so that your heart doesn’t have to work as hard,” said Alexander Fanaroff, a Penn cardiologist and one of the lead researchers on the project.

    The research team will see whether the participants who had access to the game sustained significantly fewer instances of stroke, heart attack, or heart failure.

    Only people with an elevated risk of heart disease can take part in the trial.

    Making walking into a game

    As a cardiologist, Fanaroff spends a lot of time telling patients to exercise more.

    It doesn’t always work.

    “The hardest thing for people to do is change their behavior,” he said.

    The Penn team has spent the last decade using concepts from behavioral economics — a field that combines psychology and economics to understand human decision-making — to hone an intervention to promote exercise.

    The current program design, which works like a game, is the product of three previous clinical trials that showed the potential of Penn’s game-based approach to improving physical activity.

    Here’s how it works: First, participants establish their baseline step count over two weeks, and then set a goal to increase their daily steps by 33% to 50%.

    Each week, patients are given 70 points — that’s 10 per day. Every day that they meet their goal, they keep their points. If they fail to keep up, they lose 10 points.

    They move up or down levels each week, based on the cumulative points.

    Patients need only to own a smartphone to participate, since their steps are tracked by the built-in sensors now in most devices.

    Daily results are delivered through text.

    “If you have an app on your phone, you might not look at it, but if you’re getting a text message every day, you’re engaged,” Fanaroff said.

    Participants also identify a support partner, such as a family member or friend, who will get weekly email updates on how the person is doing in the game.

    The study is entirely remote, with patients enrolling via a web platform.

    Participants who are not sorted into the game approach will receive “usual care,” which consists of medical providers simply telling patients to be more physically active. They will also download a standard exercise app, which normally monitors their steps without turning it into a game.

    Trying to improve health and reduce costs

    The trial will enroll adults who have a 10% or higher chance of a cardiovascular event over the next 10 years, as determined by the American Heart Association’s PREVENT calculator.

    This includes anybody who has ever had a heart attack or stroke, or received a stent, Fanaroff said. It also includes almost all people over 65 with multiple cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, or diabetes.

    “It’s not everybody, but it is a good-sized chunk of the population,” he said.

    If successful, he hopes the evidence could convince insurers to fund programs that increase physical activity.

    The Penn team estimates the game could be delivered for less than $50 per person.

    “If it’s effective at reducing cardiovascular events, it would actually probably be cost-saving to the health system,” Fanaroff said.

    He also hopes the results can guide doctors to better counsel patients.

    “We just don’t know the best way to get people to increase physical activity at all, so all we wind up doing is telling people, ‘Physical activity is important for your health,’” he said.

  • Five Philly science wins of 2025: Big prizes, biotech moves, and global recognition for Baby KJ.

    Five Philly science wins of 2025: Big prizes, biotech moves, and global recognition for Baby KJ.

    Despite being one of the rockiest years yet for science — marked by millions of dollars in funding cuts and controversial shake-ups to the federal infrastructure — Philadelphia scientists still managed to celebrate many wins in 2025.

    Some institutions expanded their research with new centers dedicated to autoimmunity, HIV, Williams syndrome, and drug development. Others won big grants to develop better drugs for asthma and study the causes of autism.

    Local scientists published exciting research on treatments for type 1 diabetes and ovarian cancer, designed self-heating concrete, and proposed ways to turn toxic fungi, snake venom, and trees into medicine.

    They also won national and international honors for work in physics, cancer research, and drug repurposing. And although no local scientists won a Nobel Prize this year, two at Monell Chemical Senses Center were recognized by its satirical counterpart, the Ig Nobel Prize.

    Here are five notable Philly science wins from 2025:

    1. Baby KJ is successfully treated with personalized gene editing therapy

    Philadelphia-area child KJ Muldoon, now 16 months old, has already been called a “trailblazing baby” by the top scientific journal Nature and recognized by the publication as one of 10 people who helped shape science in 2025.

    This international recognition came after his life-threatening genetic condition was successfully treated with a personalized gene editing therapy earlier this year by doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

    Baby KJ was born in August 2024 with a metabolic disorder that prevented his liver from being able to process protein. Called severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency, the disorder puts babies at risk of severe brain damage and is fatal more than half the time.

    With few options to treat him, the CHOP and Penn team — led by doctors Kiran Musunuru and Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas — opted for a gene-editing technology known as CRISPR to create a customized drug for KJ that would fix the genetic mutation that was driving his disease.

    After receiving three doses, KJ was able to return home in June — ending his 307-day-long stay at the hospital. Though not a cure, the medication has dramatically improved his liver function and made the effects of his disease milder, doctors say.

    CHOP and Penn treated an infant with a rare disease by editing his genes

    2. Penn physicists share the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

    Penn particle physicists (from left) Joseph Kroll, Brig Williams, and Elliot Lipeles, pictured in 2011. They are part of the ATLAS research team that helped discover the Higgs boson, an elementary particle, and were honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize for their ongoing Higgs research.

    This year, Penn physicists shared one of science’s biggest honors: the Breakthrough Prize.

    They were among 13,000 scientists across more than 70 countries to be recognized for their involvement in particle physics experiments at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in Switzerland.

    These decades-long research collaborations have explored the fundamental structure of particles that make up the universe, using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long particle accelerator.

    The Penn team — consisting of more than two dozen scientists, including Joseph Kroll, Evelyn Thomson, Elliot Lipeles, Dylan Rankin, and Brig Williams — was specifically part of the ATLAS Experiment, which played a key role in the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, a critical particle in modern particle physics theory. The Higgs discovery helped confirm how fundamental particles acquire mass.

    Penn physicists share Breakthrough Prize with international team of researchers

    3. David Fajgenbaum honored for drug repurposing research

    David Fajgenbaum was diagnosed with Castleman disease, a rare lymph node disorder with limited treatment options. When chemotherapy didn’t work, the third-year medical student worked with his doctors to discover that a medication approved for preventing organ rejection in transplant patients could help him, too.

    Penn immunologist David Fajgenbaum received one of the nation’s oldest science prizes, the John Scott Award, this year for his pioneering work repurposing existing drugs for new uses.

    He entered this field 15 years ago after a rare and deadly diagnosis of idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease nearly killed him. The disease had no approved treatment nor any treatment guidelines at the time.

    Then a medical student at Penn, Fajgenbaum started collecting samples of his blood to test for abnormalities. The data helped him identify an existing drug called sirolimus — primarily given to organ transplant recipients — which has put him in remission for the last decade.

    Now through his nonprofit Every Cure, Fajgenbaum has made it his mission to use AI technology to match available medications with rare, hard-to-treat diseases.

    He published a case study in the New England Journal of Medicine in February, where his AI tool helped identify an off-label treatment for another patient with Castleman disease who, at the time, was entering hospice care after all available treatments had failed. As of that study’s publication, the patient has been in a yearslong remission.

    Penn immunologist David Fajgenbaum receives prestigious John Scott Award

    4. Lilly Gateway Labs biotech incubator coming to Philly

    Eli Lilly is opening a branch of Lilly Gateway Labs, an incubator for developing biotech companies, in Philadelphia, the Indianapolis company announced Wednesday. The site, in a new life sciences building at 2300 Market St. in Philadelphia, is the fifth in the United States for the pharmaceutical giant.

    Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co announced in November its plans to open a Lilly Gateway Labs site — an incubator for early-stage biotech companies — in Center City.

    It was a positive sign for a biotech scene that otherwise lags behind other cities.

    The incubator, which will be Lilly’s fifth in the United States, will span 44,000 square feet on the first two levels of 2300 Market St. Since the program’s launch in 2019, companies at the other locations (in Boston, South San Francisco, and San Diego) have raised more than $3 billion from investors toward more than 50 therapeutic programs, according to Lilly.

    Lilly plans to house six to eight companies at the Philadelphia location, with the goal of welcoming the first startups in the first quarter of 2026.

    Eli Lilly & Co. is opening a Lilly Gateway Labs biotech incubator in Philadelphia

    5. Carl June wins international honors for CAR-T research

    Carl June won international prizes for his cancer research at the University of Pennsylvania.

    Penn cancer scientist Carl June added two more international prizes to his trophy case in September for his pioneering work engineering the body’s immune system to fight cancer.

    June is known for developing the first FDA-approved CAR-T therapy, an immunotherapy in which regular immune cells are genetically modified to become cancer-killing super soldiers. It has revolutionized treatment for blood cancers, saving tens of thousands of lives since its first use in a 2010 clinical trial he co-led at Penn.

    Though his past work is what won him the inaugural Broermann Medical Innovation Award and the 2025 Balzan Prize for Gene and Gene-Modified Cell Therapy this year, his lab has remained busy, working on ways to apply CAR-T to solid cancers, enhance the therapy for lymphoma, and even re-engineer cells inside the body.

    June has also made moves on the biotech front: A company he co-founded with the purpose of applying CAR-T to autoimmune diseases, Capstan Therapeutics, was bought by AbbVie this summer for $2.1 billion.

    Penn’s CAR-T pioneer Carl June talks about the future of his award-winning work to train the body to fight cancer