Senators press HHS on prediction markets tied to drug trials and FDA approvals

Two Democratic senators have asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. what his department has done about prediction markets that trade on clinical trial results and Food and Drug Administration approvals. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon sent the letter on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026, CNBC reported; the outlet obtained it first. The letter was not posted on either senator’s website or the Senate Finance Committee’s as of Wednesday afternoon, so this account rests on CNBC’s report.

The senators asked what measures HHS has taken to mitigate the risks they see in these markets. “Allowing individuals to bet on the success of these trials and drugs undermines the scientific process, creates perverse incentives for researchers, harms trial participants, and could lead to dangerous medical outcomes for untold numbers of Americans,” they wrote.

Their concerns fall into two groups. The first is patients: repeating worries raised by some health care professionals, the senators argue that the markets could change how patients think about whether to join a trial. The second is potential insider trading by researchers and regulators who may have access to nonpublic information.

What the senators want from HHS

The letter asks the department for three sets of records:

• all internal communications about staff participation in prediction markets tied to matters HHS governs;
• all communications between the department and the prediction market platforms, and between the department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates event contracts;
• any internal analyses of the markets’ potential impact.

The senators want HHS, the FDA and the National Institutes of Health to put guardrails in place to keep individuals from profiting on the success and approval of drugs. CNBC’s report does not mention a deadline for a reply.

What the platforms list

Both Kalshi and Polymarket offer these contracts, although Polymarket’s are only on its international exchange, which isn’t regulated in the U.S.

Kalshi launched its biotech markets on July 16, 2026, as a pilot with AppliedXL, a public intelligence company that supplies the resolution infrastructure. Each contract names a public document as its resolution source: the registered primary endpoint on ClinicalTrials.gov, the FDA approval letter, or the advisory committee vote record. Launch examples included whether AR1001’s POLARIS-AD Phase 3 trial would meet its primary endpoint in early Alzheimer’s disease, and whether the FDA would approve Gilead and Arcellx’s anito-cel for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.

Kalshi set out several safeguards at launch. It limited it to late-stage trials, arguing that earlier-phase contracts carry greater insider trading risk. It lists a trial contract only after enrollment closes, because a visible price could influence physician referral and recruitment. It said it would require employment verification for every trader in these markets, and that its existing ban on trading by anyone holding material nonpublic information applies as it does elsewhere on the exchange. Kalshi called the launch a pilot it would study before any broader release, and CEO Tarek Mansour described drug development as “one of the most important and most information-constrained industries on earth.”

As of 1:11 p.m. ET on Nov. 11, Kalshi’s public API listed open contracts on FDA approvals and filings. Among them, by last traded price and contracts traded:

• Retatrutide (LY3437943) approved before Jan. 1, 2027: 2 cents, 74,499 contracts. Before July 1, 2027: 11 cents, 28,308 contracts. Before Jan. 1, 2028: 56 cents, 7,987 contracts.
• MDMA (midomafetamine) for PTSD approved before Jan. 1, 2029: 49 cents, 2,555 contracts.
• CagriSema approved before July 1, 2027: 93 cents, 2,182 contracts.
• Beam Therapeutics submitting a BLA for risto-cel before 2027: 52 cents, 1,805 contracts.

Volumes are contracts, not dollars; beyond the retatrutide contracts, most open FDA markets have traded a few thousand contracts or fewer. No open contract on a trial’s primary endpoint turned up in a check of Kalshi’s drug-development series, including those that resolve on ClinicalTrials.gov or AppliedXL; the open ones are FDA-decision markets.

Where it fits

It follows a Nov. 9 letter in which Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley pressed the White House counsel over staff bets, after President Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator settled CFTC charges over trades in presidential mention markets. In September, the EU’s securities regulator wrote that prediction markets are “rife with inside trading.”

CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment, a disclosure CNBC prints with its report.

The letter is a request for information addressed to HHS, not to the platforms, and it does not change any rule. It asks the department to hand over its internal communications on staff participation in these markets, its communications with the platforms and the CFTC, and any analyses of the markets’ impact. Regulators with access to nonpublic information are one of the two groups the senators named as an insider-trading risk.

Our AI news desk researched and wrote this article, and software checked every factual sentence against the records it links to, following the WriterOps methodology. Report an error.