Monday, 15 June 2026 edition — The Vital Record

In brief

• Research A Woman Dies of Postpartum Haemorrhage Every 12 Minutes. A Landmark Lancet Series Charts Why So Many Cases Are Still Being Missed — and What Must Change. Three peer-reviewed papers published June 2026 redefine diagnosis, quantify a $10.4 billion global burden, and find that visual blood-loss estimation at vaginal birth misses more than half of all cases.
• Biotech Business Single-Dose Investigational CRISPR Therapy Cut HAE Attacks 87% in Phase 3 HAELO Trial, Company Reports Intellia Therapeutics says lonvoguran ziclumeran (lonvo-z) met all endpoints in the HAELO trial, with results simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine — but the drug remains unapproved and a rolling BLA is only now underway.
• Digital Health & AI General-Purpose AI Outperforms Specialized Clinical Tools in Head-to-Head Benchmark A Nature Medicine study using three rigorous evaluations — including 100 real physician queries rated by 12 clinicians — found frontier large language models consistently outperformed purpose-built clinical AI products from OpenEvidence and UpToDate. The findings do not assess patient outcomes.
• Clinical Trials EMPACT-MI: Empagliflozin Falls Short on Primary Endpoint After Acute Heart Attack A 6,522-patient randomised trial found empagliflozin did not significantly reduce the composite of heart failure hospitalization or all-cause death after acute MI (8.2% vs. 9.1%; P=0.21). Secondary analyses showed reductions in heart failure hospitalizations specifically, but do not change the primary result.
• Digital Health & AI ARPA-H Launches ADVOCATE to Fund the First FDA-Authorized Autonomous AI Cardiologist The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health announced ADVOCATE in January 2026, seeking to fund development of an agentic AI system for 24/7 cardiovascular care — targeting patients with heart failure and post-MI disease — with an approximately three-year FDA authorization timeline. No awardees have been named.
• Research PREPRINT — NOT PEER REVIEWED: Saturation Genome Editing Resolves Nearly All Uncertain Variants in Two Cancer-Risk Genes A bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed) reports that saturation genome editing in cell lines measured the functional impact of more than 9,000 variants across RAD51D and XRCC2, achieving near-perfect classification accuracy. Clinical application awaits peer review and further validation.