In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at the federal program to use agentic AI against heart failure, the billionaire dentist, Wegovy by subscription, Kailera’s planned IPO, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Yet nearly half of all counties lack a cardiologist and 86% of rural counties don’t have one. That’s why the federal government’s health moonshot agency, ARPA-H, is requesting ideas for how to develop agentic AI to solve the problem.

The FDA has already authorized more than 1,000 AI-enabled medical devices, says Haider Warraich, a program manager at ARPA-H, who came up with the idea in August 2024 while working as a senior advisor for chronic diseases to the FDA Commissioner. But all are predictive devices, primarily used for diagnosis–not agentic AI used to provide care. This program is one way in which AI doctors (though Warraich dislikes the term) could be structured to be safe for patients and improve health.

“The FDA has regulatory authority, but for something like this you need to fund new science,” he tells Forbes. “The way people are going to use the technology in real life is going to be different than how people use it in a clinical trial or controlled setting.”

In January, ARPA-H requested proposals for the program, dubbed Advocate, for agentic AI for cardiovascular disease. Teams that include healthtech players and major health systems were asked to pitch development plans for patient-facing technologies to provide clinical care to manage patients with heart failure and those who’ve survived heart attacks, as well as how they’d scale, monitor and supervise the technology after it’s deployed. The agency has received nearly 300 solution summaries as of Tuesday. That makes it “one of the most oversubscribed programs in ARPA-H history,” Warraich says.

The agency hopes to choose the winning teams this summer with the goal of shepherding new technologies through the FDA approval process two years after the contract is awarded.

In setting up the program, Warraich, a cardiologist who’d previously run a heart failure clinic, says he chose the disease because so few people – just 2.5% of patients nationally with heart failure – receive appropriate treatment for it. Yet unlike diseases like Alzheimer’s or ALS that lack effective treatment, there are therapies that could help, including low-cost, widely available beta blockers. “The standard of care is extremely poor. It is insane,” he says. “We believe if you can do it for heart failure you can do it for any disease because it is a hard disease to treat.”

While he’s realistic about the risks of using agentic AI in clinical care, he argues that they can be overcome with testing and safeguards. “It doesn’t mean there won’t be mistakes or it will be perfect,” he says. “But can it be better than the status quo? I think the answer is yes.”

Meet The Billionaire Dentist Who Built The Industry’s Largest Conglomerate With Backing From KKR

Rick Workman may be the country’s only billionaire dentist. At 71, he has spent the last four decades creating the largest dental operation in the United States. His Effingham, Illinois–based Heartland Dental has 1,900 practices with some 3,100 dentists across 39 states. In 2024, Heartland Dental generated about $3.6 billion in revenue and $455 million in earnings handling the business side of dentistry: payroll, staffing, marketing and supplies. Its dentists focus on treating patients.

In 2018, private equity firm KKR, which manages $744 billion in assets, bought a 58% stake in the company at a $2.8 billion valuation. Today, Heartland is worth $6 billion, giving Workman, who serves as chairman, an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion. Private equity has been rolling up dental practices – along with veterinary ones and other once overlooked small businesses across America – but none have gotten so big as Heartland.

That’s made Workman persona non grata among some dentists, who see private equity-backed conglomerates like his prioritizing productivity and profits over patient care, and have made the industry hypercompetitive. “I learned the Chicago way,” he says, nodding to the city’s reputation for bare-knuckle politics.

Read the whole story here.

Novo Nordisk Launches Subscriptions For Obesity Drugs

Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk launched a subscription program for its weight-loss drug, Wegovy, to patients who have a prescription through a telehealth firm such as Ro or WeightWatchers. The drugmaker said it will soon expand to other providers as well.

Subscribers will get discounted pricing: Patients who use injections could save up to $1,200 per year while those opting for pills could save up to $600. The longer the duration of the subscription, the greater the discount.

The program is for cash-pay customers only, not those who have insurance coverage for the medication. But it could provide a steady market. That’s important for the drugmaker, as a recent analysis found that only about one-third of patients who start on a GLP-1 drug are still taking it a year later, with cost and access being a major reason for the drop-off.

Novo Nordisk’s stock, which is down nearly 30% on the year, ticked up at the news, closing up more than 4% on Tuesday.

Kailera Therapeutics filed for an initial public offering to raise funds to develop its next-generation obesity drugs. Those therapies, which it licensed from Chinese drug giant Hengrui Pharma, include a lead candidate in global phase 3 clinical trials. Forbes profiled the Waltham, Mass.-based company in April 2025. It subsequently raised $600 million, tying for the industry’s largest investment of the year with AI drug developer Isomorphic Labs.

Drug development is expensive: The company reported in its S-1 registration statement that it lost $149 million in 2025 and said that it expected its expenses “to increase substantially” as it moved its product pipeline through later stage development. The filing did not disclose how many shares it intended to offer or at what price.

The market for obesity drugs remains enormous, even if not quite as big as previously predicted. Analysts at Jefferies now forecast sales of $80 billion by the early-2030s, down from some $100 billion.

Wearable device maker Whoop raised $575 million at a $10.1 billion valuation led by Collaborative Fund. Founders Will Ahmed, John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list in 2017.

Startup Neion Bio is working to turn chicken eggs into drug factories.

What to know about the latest COVID-19 variant, which appears to be able to evade previous immunity.

The leading medical school accreditor dropped its requirement to teach about health equity under pressure from the Trump Administration.

It was a big week for pharma M&A. Eli Lilly is buying narcolepsy drug company Cantessa Pharmaceuticals for $6.3 billion; Biogen is paying $5.6 billion for kidney disease biotech Apellis for $5.6 billion; Novartis is acquiring allergy biotech startup Excellergy for up to $2 billion; and Otsuka is purchasing psychiatric meds company Transcend Therapeutics for as much as $1.2 billion.

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