What a year! Yes, it was our 10th anniversary, but it also brought an unprecedented blizzard of news, and while we weren’t added to a Signal chat on war plans, we did have a giant health insurer email us internal strategy documents by mistake. Our coverage featured everything from a piece about a tuxedo-wearing baby who made history to the story of a towering yet controversial scientist told by a late (and treasured) colleague of ours.
Since our most popular stories focused on the impact of the Trump administration on health and medicine, we start this overview with our 10-part series “American Science, Shattered.” It was described by one outlet as “the most comprehensive telling of this year’s carnage” in academia and government-funded research. As for President Trump himself, we looked at the mystery of the bruise on his hand, and why a 79-year-old man might need an MRI.
Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was the subject of a revelatory profile here. His agenda was so sweeping, we created a tracker to document the progress made on the promises he laid out as part of the Make America Healthy Again movement.
Kennedy’s supporting cast of characters were featured in STAT profiles, including Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary. Like other health agencies, the FDA saw layoffs and sweeping executive turnover in 2025; but two key players, in particular, invited controversy there: Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Høeg.
The Make America Healthy Again movement turned one year old in 2025. To help make sense of its ambitions under Kennedy, we built an interactive way to look at all the ways it could go about tackling chronic disease issues in the country. We traveled to the heart of the MAHA movement — Texas — to get a better sense of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the health care system and modern medicine. We traveled to Slovenia to investigate alternative approaches.
If we had to pick a breakout story of the year, it might be a deep dive on the rise, fall, and uncertain future of Moderna. The biotech company, once heralded for developing a vaccine against Covid-19, saw its ambitions thwarted. There were corporate missteps, but the company also had to face skeptics of its mRNA technology, including those elected to power in Washington. As mRNA technology fell out of favor, academics also felt an impact, even as they tried to counter claims on the dangers of mRNA vaccines with evidence. One such claim was so outlandish, we interviewed the Nobel Prize winner whose discoveries helped invent the technology. He called it “absolutely impossible.”
We had to do a lot of that kind of debunking in 2025. Month after month, the same story landed in our top 50: How science proves vaccines don’t cause autism.
Biotech and pharma
It was the year that Eli Lilly’s weight loss and diabetes drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro topped Keytruda as world’s best-selling medicines, and the year FDA rejections of therapies from Replimune Group and Capricor Therapeutics sent shivers through the industry. The FDA has a new way to expedite the review of certain drugs, and experts worry more than science is involved.
Boston still holds the lead as the nation’s biotech capital. In San Diego, there’s uncertainty. In North Carolina, there’s optimism. The shadow over everything is the rise of Chinese biotech.
In this sector, news comes from research — on hair loss, smoking cessation, lupus, gonorrhea — and mergers and acquisitions. The top deals of 2025 included:
- Johnson & Johnson acquiring the maker of Caplyta, Intra‑Cellular Therapies, for $14.6 billion.
- Novartis expanding its neuromuscular portfolio with a $12 billion purchase of Avidity.
- Merck buying lung-disease biotech Verona Pharma for $10 billion.
- Pfizer acquiring Metsera after winning a bidding war with Novo Nordisk, to the tune of $10 billion.
Trends and highlights
To mix the interesting and the important:
- Artificial intelligence was a major disruptor in 2025. So how did experts do on their 2025 health AI bingo card?
- What happens when you’re suffering from a condition and doctors aren’t even sure it’s real? Here’s a look at post-tubal ligation syndrome.
- It’s not inevitable that men die sooner than women.
- The average truck driver dies at age 61. Here are people trying to help them live longer.
- The best and worst drug names of 2025.
- Why beagles are used in animal testing.
- A man bitten by snakes 856 times. For science.
- A deep discount fire sale on human tissue and stem cells.
- And an old-fashioned, human-interest feature story about a Louisiana case worker helping expecting moms.
Science and discovery
From “amazing” results on a small study of CD40 agonist antibodies used against metastatic cancer to a new understanding of the voices in your head, science and scientists broke new ground:
- Miriam Merad is on a 20-year quest to rewrite cancer immunotherapy.
- Did a drug prevent this man’s ALS?
- Taurine, a darling of longevity seekers, was found to be an unreliable biomarker for aging.
- New studies provided new clues on the stubborn persistence of Lyme disease.
The health care business
In a year where we tracked the impact of private equity, vertical integration and profit margins higher than Mickey Mouse, some highlights include:
- Paying cash for weight loss drugs and leaving everything else to health insurance gained more acceptance, at least among employers.
- Health insurer research on the effectiveness of Medicare Advantage saw some scrutiny. For instance, UnitedHealth and Humana.
- Hospitals use AI to increase billing codes to insurers. Insurers use AI to fight back against aggressive coding. Here’s a look at the behind-the-scenes battle.
- The Department of Justice settled fraud claims against Semler Scientific, which moved from being a medical device maker to bitcoin treasury company.
All across the brand
Our STATus List identifies the movers and shakers of the year. STAT Wunderkinds is an annual honor for young, up-and-coming scientists. STAT Madness is a bracket-style competition for scientists, won two years in a row by the Baylor College of Medicine. In 2025, we launched a new video explainer series, STATus Report. A good example here: What Ozempic, rollerblades, and dumpsters have in common.
We hold STAT events throughout the year, including three summits. At our summit in New York, Bill Nye the Science Guy had plenty to say. In San Francisco, we heard a heartbreaking story of care denied. In Boston, the first baby to receive a personalized gene-editing treatment stole the show. He was wearing a tiny tuxedo.
Two aspects deserved best-of pages of their own: STAT’s most popular First Opinion essays, and our 2025 photos of the year.
Remembrances
2025 saw the passing of some notable figures. Austin Leclaire raised awareness of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Adam Hayden was an inspiration to others as he lived with terminal brain cancer for nine years. Donavon Decker contributed to a treatment that he knew would never be available to him.
Among researchers, one of the most notable passings of the year was that of James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA. Later in his life, he moved from pioneer to pariah, a holder of odious views.
Upon his death in November, STAT published a look back at his career and the controversies he engendered by Sharon Begley, who wrote it before her own passing in 2021. For getting the last word on Watson, she gets the last word here, too.
