Sydney Lupkin
Sydney Lupkin is the pharmaceuticals correspondent for NPR.
She was most recently a correspondent at Kaiser Health News, where she covered drug prices and specialized in data reporting for its enterprise team. She's reported on how tainted drugs can reach consumers, how companies take advantage of rare disease drug rules and how FDA-approved generics often don't make it to market. She's also tracked pharmaceutical dollars to patient advocacy groups and members of Congress. Her work has won the National Press Club's Joan M. Friedenberg Online Journalism Award, the National Institute for Health Care Management's Digital Media Award and a health reporting award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
Lupkin graduated from Boston University. She's also worked for ABC News, VICE News, MedPage Today and The Bay Citizen. Her internship and part-time work includes stints at ProPublica, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The New England Center for Investigative Reporting and WCVB.
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Cheaper versions of Wegovy and Zepbound touted on social media could be fleeting. Copies are legal now because the brand-name drugs are in short supply. But the drugmakers are boosting production. -
Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro are in such high demand that many patients with Type 2 diabetes can't get them when they need them. -
Insurance companies are covering fewer drugs than they used to, and patients have to jump through more hoops to get many of them. When shopping for insurance, check for coverage of the drugs you need. -
Insurance companies are covering fewer drugs than they did in 2010, and they’re making patients jump through more hoops and pay more money to get them. A report from GoodRx documents the issues.
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Akira Endo, the Japanese scientist whose research led to statin drugs, has died. Tens of millions of people in the U.S. take statins to reduce their cholesterol.
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As more people try weight-loss drugs like Wegovy, some skip the brand name and buy compounded semaglutide from online pharmacies. But some of these may not follow state and federal standards. -
After a 2022 law lifted the ban on Medicare negotiating drug prices, the government is in talks to lower prices on 10 medicines that cost the program billions of dollars a year. How's it going?
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As more people turn to blockbuster drugs like Wegovy to shed weight, many are considering cheaper alternatives from specialized pharmacies that make custom batches of medicines.
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When Thorsten Siess was in graduate school, he came up with the idea for a heart device that's now been used in hundreds of thousands of patients around the world. -
New medications like Wegovy are changing the way people lose weight and manage obesity, but many Medicaid beneficiaries can't get them.
