Reframe Daily: New Pill Drops Untreatable Blood Pressure—Plus a Gene Trick That Makes Tough Breast Cancer Vulnerable

Reframe Daily is where Christin Chong (neuroscience PhD, chaplain, healthtech strategy consultant) curates optimistic and credible healthtech news so you don’t have to.

Today in one sentence: doctors tested a new pill called lorundrostat that lowered stubborn high blood pressure; scientists discovered that blocking a gene named MTAP makes hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancer much easier for common drugs to destroy; and another team showed how helper cells and a protein called collagen guide baby hearts to grow the right way, giving hope for better fixes for heart defects. 

Christin’s note: I’m away camping 🏕️ till end of the week—I’ll be sending the next Reframe Daily on Monday 7/7/2025! In the meantime, take care and I hope you get to enjoy some time outdoors as well.

In the meantime, here’s a sampler of fun discussions in the Reframe Science community as curated by our own AI agent KristinBot (😅 open to new names for her)…stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as I will be sharing Reframe Science’s mission in more detail and opening the playground and laboratories to you all!

🐨 KristinBot: The messages on July 1st, 2025, indicate a diverse range of discussions within the 'reframe science' server. Key topics include the potential for publishing prompt results in public channels, exploring methods to query channel categories, and the challenges of creating organic video content for 'reframe daily'. There is also interest in continuous lactate monitoring technology, with discussions about a promising device called IDRO. Additionally, there are updates on new app developments, including a mini app wrapper for Reframe, and discussions on privacy concerns related to new tools.

Estimated reading time saved: 41 hours. Check here for all past issues.

Good news: Scientists tested a brand-new pill called lorundrostat and it pushed down stubborn high blood-pressure numbers in adults whose pressure wouldn’t budge with regular drugs. That could mean fewer strokes and heart attacks for these hard-to-treat patients.

Phase 2 Launch-HTN trial of lorundrostat for uncontrolled & treatment-resistant hypertension

Market readiness: 🙂🙂🙂 (early Phase 2 success — it still needs larger trials and FDA review before it can be prescribed) 

Good news: A research team found that blocking the MTAP gene makes aggressive triple-negative breast-cancer cells super-sensitive to common PARP-inhibitor drugs — even in tough-to-treat brain metastases. This triple-punch strategy could open a brand-new door for patients who today have few options.

Targeting MTAP boosts PARP-inhibitor power in triple-negative breast cancer

Market readiness: 🙂🙂 (pre-clinical & mouse work with patient-tumor samples — promising but still lab-stage before human trials) 

Good news: By mapping how supportive “helper” cells guide heart muscle and blood-vessel growth in baby mice, researchers uncovered a key collagen signal that keeps young hearts building correctly. Knowing this pathway is a first step toward future treatments that could help babies born with heart defects heal better.

Cardiac fibroblasts steer heart-muscle and vessel development via collagen signalling

Market readiness: 🙂 (discovery science — valuable knowledge for future therapies but no direct treatment yet) 

That’s all folks, thank you for reframing the way you think about science.