The man accused of organizing the killing of rap icon Tupac Shakur nearly 30 years ago is finally on trial right here in Las Vegas.

Plus.

this accelerates timeline for treatment.

It accelerates our ability to understand what a treatment is doing, The excitement and ethical concerns surrounding organoids and how Unlv is using them to advance Alzheimer's research and.

my own son had a catastrophic medical situation, and research ultimately did save his life.

The research helping more children survive cancer and the new financial pressures facing their families.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hearn, STAT and other supporters.

Welcome to Nevada Week on member Renee Dixon.

Most Vegas is no stranger to the national spotlight, but the attention it's getting right now is for an event that happened 30 years ago.

On September 7th, 1996, rapper Tupac Shakur was killed in a Drive-By shooting near the Las Vegas Strip.

And now, 63 year old Dewayne Davis is on trial for allegedly orchestrating the murder.

Davis has pleaded not guilty.

His trial began with jury selection on August 10th, and on Wednesday, the prosecution rested its case.

And in that Las Vegas courtroom for it all has been Jessica Hill.

Reporter for the Associated Press.

Jessica, welcome back to Nevada Week.

Thanks for having me.

How strong is the evidence in this case?

That is a great question.

It depends on what you consider evidence.

Prosecution has really showed, the jurors Davis's own words.

However, defense has said there's no real physical evidence that ties client to Las Vegas that night and to the shooting.

We saw one, like, account that there were bills, like hotel bills from Las Vegas, that were found in Davis's home.

However, we don't know where those bills are, and we don't know the date of those bills.

But mostly prosecutors just relied on Davis's own words.

You know, he wrote a book or coauthored a book.

And he described himself being there that night.

He testified to law enforcement in 2008 during a proffer agreement describing his own role.

And then he also promoted his book and participated in multiple interviews with media, outlining his role.

And it just depends on what you consider evidence.

Prosecution says this should be enough to convict him.

And his defense has been like, well, my client is not trustworthy and he's unreliable.

And these words were just made to make money.

What did he say to police back in 2008 about his role?

So he described how he was in the car that night in the white Cadillac that pulled up next to Tupac Shakur, and.

Good night.

He was in the passenger seat, and because he was in the passenger seat, he couldn't get a good shot.

He said that he would have if they were on the other side.

But he said that he gave the gun back to the backseat and shots were fired from back there.

He made other claims, that Tupac, it looked like, had reached for a gun.

However, that has not been proven that there's a gun in the car.

Some of his, like, testimony has verified has like, varied during like depending on what interview was.

In some cases he has said, his nephew Orlando Anderson was the one that pulled the trigger.

And other times he says that he doesn't know who pulled the trigger.

But regardless, he was the only one that's allegedly still alive who was in the car.

Orlando Anderson is his nephew.

He has passed away since he's believed to be the man that actually pulled the trigger.

How big of a deal was it that the judge allowed that recording with police to be admitted as evidence?

It was a big deal.

I think it's one of their main pieces of evidence at this point, because this was an agreement that Davis had to tell the truth to law enforcement.

It's also a big deal because he was told that this would never be used against him.

In, in the hearing, you know, you could hear them talk about how this proffer agreement was private.

This would not be used.

You know, we're not here to arrest you.

And in the courtroom, as this was being played, you could hear people like, you know, make a sound or, like, shake their head.

Not necessarily, you know, in favor of Davis, but just like, acknowledging that, you know, the prosecution has said we're not prosecution, but law enforcement has said this would be used against you.

And it has been.

So I think that helps, you know, prosecution, and defense has to say, well, maybe he wasn't telling the truth in this interview either.

What has the courtroom been like?

Who's been there every day?

Has it been packed?

Most days it's been mostly packed, yes.

Tupac Shakur, his family has been sitting in the front row every single day of the trial.

We've seen, you know, fans come in and listening intently.

And then just, you know, some curious bystanders, I decide to come in and just watch the trials proceeding for that day.

Really?

Yes.

Yeah.

I talked to a couple who were on vacation in Vegas, and they're like, we just want to check out a trial.

So they decided on it.

Yeah.

What about the defendant, Dwayne Davis?

What has he been like in court?

He's mostly been pretty quiet.

You know, we are watching his facial expressions.

Sometimes he seems frustrated.

There was one moment, a few days ago in court where after the jury had left, he sat up and told the judge that he was really upset that witnesses have been giving out his addresses.

Because, you know, it's being live streamed everywhere and people are watching.

And in some cases, witnesses have talked about, you know, how they conducted searches on Dwayne Davis's, you know, residences.

And he has said that, you know, they're giving out his address on in public, and people have come to his house and like, cry for us family.

And so actually, in response, prosecution has made sure that his address hasn't been given out since.

Okay.

And then what about Tupac's family who is there from his family, and what are they telling you?

Yeah, his, brother and sister have been there.

And then some, like family friends, some cousins have been there throughout the trial.

Mostly they're just, like, sitting pretty quietly and watching, you know, intently what is happening.

They have talked to me about how they feel like the justice is coming far too late.

You know, it has been 30 years.

They're wondering why it's taken so long.

And there are a lot of other questions that haven't been answered yet that they'd like to see, you know, brought up.

Okay, so the prosecution has rested its case.

It's the defense defense's turn now.

Will they have their defendant, Duane Davis, testify?

At this point, we do not know.

He was, taking it under consideration, last night.

It.

Wednesday night.

Wednesday night?

Yes.

So it's not clear yet.

I, I will guess that the answer is no.

But we shall see.

It would be interesting if he does take the stand.

Why would you be asked that?

I think, the defense attorney doesn't want his client to testify, especially because his entire words have been used against him.

So far.

And, you know, the judge has made it clear that if he does take the stand, he will be, you know, cross-examined.

And so we'll see what happens with that, if that you know, does come to fruition.

And then what about the timeline of this trial?

I have read it was estimated it would take about a month, but it seems it could be wrapping up quicker.

Is that true?

And does that indicate anything about the case?

Yes, it definitely is wrapping up much more quickly.

We're expecting closing statements to happen on Monday.

And then, you know, jury will obviously take it under consideration and maybe we'll have a verdict within the next, you know, several days.

This is the task for that jury.

Yes.

Yeah.

I don't think it's an easy case to really consider, you know.

The defense attorney, he says that he was not surprised by how quickly it's been going.

He claims, you know, it's because there is not a lot of evidence.

And there's only so many times that you could replay Dwayne Davis's words.

So all right, Jessica Hill of the Associated Press, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

Thanks.

I really.

September will mark childhood cancer awareness month.

The local nonprofit cure for the Kids Foundation treats children with cancer and rare diseases and, thanks to its affiliation with a national research network, is able to connect those children with more than 100 clinical trials.

I spoke with cure for the kids founder and that Logan Parker, about why access to research is personal to her, and how changes to Medicaid could affect her organization and the families it serves.

Cure for the Kids Foundation is a financial supporter of Vegas PBS, And during that process, you.

That was 25 years ago in Las Vegas.

There is very little here for children who fell into that category.

So when our medical journey was all said and done, which he's alive and well and healthy and, you know, very, active and, a Clark County firefighter as a matter of fact, father of three.

So our result was positive.

Our experience was tragic, if that makes sense.

And so I really wanted to create something where children would have access to the things that would ultimately save their life.

And that's research.

And access to research could be a variety of different things, whether it be pharmaceuticals, which is what most people consider.

But there's also research being done in medical equipment and combined therapies.

And different things like that.

So to me, access means being able to receive the care, research focused care that you need locally and care for the kids serves children who are fighting cancer, but children who are also battling rare diseases.

And when I think of that, I imagine it must be pretty expensive to pay for that treatment.

How are the patients and the families that you're serving paying for everything?

it's a mosaic of options when it comes to that.

You know, 50% of our patient population is a medicaid beneficiary.

So the other 50% has generally commercial insurance.

There might be a few that are completely uninsured.

They fall between the income levels of who would qualify for Medicaid, but they don't make enough to buy insurance.

And so under the one big beautiful bill, there will be significant cuts to Medicaid, which Republicans say is eliminating waste and fraud.

How are those cuts impacting the families and patients you serve?

Well, it's a little early to tell exactly what that impact will be.

I can tell you that there's some additional food insecurities now that the snap, requirements have changed.

So we've seen an increase in requests of food cards or grocery vouchers and things like that.

You know, the biggest issue for us is 50% of our population is a medicaid beneficiary.

A huge percentage of that.

The patients are already receiving drugs that we provide that are reimbursed less than acquisition cost.

And so we're anticipating the gap between the cost of services and reimbursement for 50% of our patient population will continue to get bigger.

And that's the gap that we need to fill.

Okay.

So as an organization you are getting reimbursed less money for the drugs that you are able to give out through Medicaid.

Right.

How are you going to handle these changes you're already dealing at with a deficit.

Well through philanthropy you know that's how we use our fundraising efforts to cover the cost between what's, what is reimbursable and what the families need.

That's not reimbursable.

And did I hear this right.

That you have families coming to you for help with groceries.

Absolutely.

That was really never something that we had anticipated would fall under our mission.

Fortunately there's a lot of local organizations that we work with that we can refer the patients to.

We have a lot of very generous donors who will give grocery vouchers and gift cards and things like that, that we can provide to our families to offset those expenses.

And the Snap requirements.

You're talking about the work requirements.

So those already went into effect.

The work requirements for Medicaid will go into effect at the start of 2027.

And that could impact the caregivers of these children, correct?

Yes it could.

Yeah.

So when it comes to Medicaid, the work requirements fall into the individual person insured.

In this case, it could potentially be the parent, the grandparent, the primary caregiver.

And that's when everybody's going to have to be very, very, careful about their paperwork.

And they're going to be needing to read the new rules around, exception criteria And it's also been our experience that oftentimes people don't lose their benefits because of lack of eligibility.

It's because they didn't meet the deadline for paperwork and things like that.

So I know that the folks at Medicaid are working really hard to do their best to decrease the burden of the paperwork, but it will have to be done more often than it was before.

So caregivers may lose their own Medicaid benefits for their own health insurance.

Children will not.

But what about young adults who have turned 18?

And maybe that's a very problematic patient population when it comes to this particular conversation, because often times the parents have been taking care of all of the paperwork needs, the medical needs, transportation needs, and then suddenly they find themselves where they're no longer the point of contact without, you know, additional paperwork to allow the parents to be able to represent the child.

And that's where it can be very difficult because you have now a patient is 18 and they're in the middle of a cancer journey, or they have a rare disease, and they're going to have to figure out the paperwork for the exemption, because they themselves will have the work requirement laid on to them when the reality is they may never have been able to work in the first place.

And that's where understanding the exemption criteria is going to be really important for people.

You mentioned the philanthropy that is needed that also helps to fund legislative work, lobbying at the federal and state level.

And you were able to get some significant legislation passed this past session.

Let's start with the newborn screenings.

What was happening before when there was a baby born and what is now happening as a result?

Wonderful.

So, the the bill was essentially to modernize our newborn screening program.

So the public health laboratory had a fee schedule that was a decade old.

And the fee schedule itself needed to be changed through legislation.

So that was the primary objective of that bill to create the environment where Medicaid could look at the fee schedule differently, because a lot happened in ten years.

And it was very, very challenging for the public health lab to keep up with the technology.

You know, there's new screenings that are available for children that weren't available ten years ago, but the fee schedule didn't keep up to allow the lab to expand to do those additional tests.

And that's important because of early detection eye masks.

Oh, yes.

Absolutely.

The diseases that our newborn screening program captures are things that, would normally not be seen until maybe toddler age or even older.

And that's when those issues have already become a huge problem and they're not reversible.

So if we can identify in infancy that there's a genetic condition that we know how to treat, we can start treating it before symptoms ever even arise.

And then the other bill deals with licensing for a genetic counselor.

Why would that be important?

Genetic counselors.

What do they even do?

Well, oh my gosh.

Genetic counselors are a huge part of helping people understand the conditions and mapping out what happens.

And we don't have a licensure requirement for them or we didn't.

We do now.

because the way it was before anybody could say, oh, I want to get a job as a genetic counselor, and they could go to work and they can learn it and, you know, do different things and work with physicians.

But this ensures that they are adequately trained and that they're following the protocols and the things that they need to.

Last question.

Intermountain health.

Nevada children's hospital.

It's scheduled to open in 2030.

It's a big deal because it will be Nevada's first standalone children's hospital.

When and if it opens.

Is that going to eliminate the need for care for the kids?

No one.

We're very excited that they're coming and building a freestanding hospital.

But in reality, it will expand the need for care for the kids.

So how that works is, you know, we're going to be partnering with them on services that inpatient pediatric oncology and rare disease services that historically have not been available in our community.

So those might be bone marrow transplants, things like that, where we send the families out of state and then they return for their general medical oncology care.

So that will start to happen in town, which is a huge milestone and a huge victory for our community.

So we're thrilled about that.

But what that means is care for the kids will have to meet the hospital in the middle and provide additional staff additional training for our staff so that we can accommodate those things.

So collaboratively, we're going to be able to offer something together that the community didn't have before, and that's going to increase the need for care for the kids, not decrease it.

All right.

Logan Parker, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

Thank you.

This week, the Las Vegas Raiders announced they're making a $25 million donation to the Intermountain Health Children's Hospital.

We hope you'll watch next week when we sit down with Raiders president and Las Vegas native Sandra Douglas Morgan to talk about the team's work in the community and the upcoming season.

We move now, though, to your brain.

Health matters.

Organoids are allowing researchers at Unlv to ask new questions about Alzheimer's disease.

That's according to Jefferson Kinney, founding chair of the Department of Brain Health at Unlv.

pieces of tissue derived from cells that are grown in a lab and mimic real organs, including the brain.

what the organoid system allows us to do is to study both the biology of Alzheimer's disease in a way that really wasn't that possible up until the last few years, because of organoids, because of the organoids.

So the the way that we studied as a field, the the pathology of Alzheimer's disease was typically either in postmortem tissue or in these animal models that render some really good information about the pathology and about the biology.

But it wasn't a really good representation of what's going on.

So in the brain of someone who had passed away or in an animal, an animal model?

Yeah.

Yes.

Anything in the brain is a very protected space, so it's really hard to look in and see and study what is going on in these diseases and what the organoids provide.

The opportunity to do is these small brains in a dish.

And by that I really mean they're small pieces of a brain.

It's not a whole intact, functioning brain, but it's derived from patients.

It is something that is exactly what comes from the disease, and it allows us to both study mechanisms.

But even more than that, in the last year, there's been a real increase in the utility of these to study treatments.

So instead of having to go through a large number of different steps, there's now the possibility to check to see if a treatment has any efficacy in one of these organoid systems.

Why that movement toward organoids and who is leading it?

The real shift here was that about a year ago, the FDA and the National Institutes of Health, which funds a lot of the research that we and others do, really started outlining that they wanted what's called novel alternative methods to be driving some of the science in this field.

And one of the novel alternative methods.

So one of them is AI and science.

One of them is big data.

One of them is these organoid systems.

And what really changed is they highlighted that they're now willing to take data from organoid systems as proof of concept into clinical trials.

So it used to be you had to test a potential treatment in an animal system.

You had to see that it had viability and then you could try and move into it.

They're now willing to accept organoid data, using compounds and testing their viability to be able to advance a treatment.

And this accelerates timeline for treatment.

It accelerates our ability to understand what a treatment is doing, and the sort of outer orbit of that is.

It also accelerates our ability to look for novel biomarkers of disease, to look at disease mechanisms all within these same systems.

That sounds like a huge deal.

It is.

It is.

It's it's a it's a leap forward.

So my background is in cell molecular biology.

And I used to do a lot of work with these preclinical models.

And we have shelved all of that work because of the utility.

And what we can glean from these organoid systems.

the biggest difference is that these preclinical models were engineered to model the disease.

But there are many aspects of what happens in humans that they don't render accurately.

Right.

This has come up many times as perhaps some of the reasons some treatments have failed that work very well in the animal models, but didn't in humans.

The difference here is that these organoids are derived from patients.

So we have organoids growing that are from Alzheimer's disease patients in cognitively normal controls.

So we're not questioning if we're rendering what's happening in the patients.

This is from the patient.

is that why the National Institutes of Health is now signing on to this?

Because it's developed to a certain point.

I mean, why wasn't this happening years ago?

So that's a very good question.

So part of it is the techniques and the accuracy of directing them into a certain type of cell.

Part of it is a sort of seachange in terms of what we have been looking at and to try something new.

And there has been some remarkable science in these organoid systems, not just in Alzheimer's disease, in lots of different fields.

So it's it's risen to this level that.

Now, can you give an example?

So there's organoids that are used in all sorts of cancer research that have shown tremendous promise.

There's actually a remarkable one from a few years ago about renal failure that organoids were very useful for.

And now that these systems are very stable and that they are well understood into brain focused efforts, it now becomes a venue to study this for Alzheimer's disease and for other neurodegenerative diseases in a way you've never been able to before, right?

The ethics of it, though, there's the issue of, are these organoids alive themselves?

Are they conscious?

Can they feel anything?

Yeah.

So it's an interesting question, especially since the stem cell preamble to the, you know, the tissue biopsy and taking these was where they were derived from.

And there were ethics there with the organoid is the ones we work with are cortical organoids.

So these are basically cortical neurons that assemble in ways to connect to one another.

But there's absolutely no sensory system in any way shape or form there.

So the way you see me, the way you hear me is very specific.

Receptors decode that information, transmit it to the brain.

It gets assembled into some sort of story that your brain puts together.

There is none of that input into these.

There is no sense.

There is no interaction.

Is that in the future, I doubt it.

I mean, I suppose so.

The organoid is the first layer we get into.

I think I think the people who came up with this have really started to have fun with words.

So the first version is an organoid.

The next layer that we're working with is something called an assembly.

And that's the neurons.

That is basically a cortex.

Cortex.

And embedded in there are glia or immune cells because that has a role in these diseases.

I'm sure at some point people are going to keep on putting pieces together, but I can envision that they would do something to have a perceiving, growing, aware thing in a dish that seems like a very strange direction and would be open to a lot of issues.

Five years from now, where do you see unfold in this work of organoids?

So that's a great question.

So in a really good progression of this, I think where we are right now, what we've done in the last year, year and a half, we've been doing this, there are some remarkable insights that we're starting to see in terms of understanding the biology of disease.

There are some really clever indications of some novel biomarkers for detection of disease, and I expect that this will be far more developed for screening possible therapies.

One of the things that's going to happen in the next year or two is different groups doing this at different places are going to have to sort of start to align and compare our notes, because there are ways that what happens at one facility and another may differ.

And I think that we're in a position that we can be one of those groups as well.

Wonderful.

Doctor Kenny, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

Absolutely.

And thank you for watching.

To see more stories from our Your Brain Health Matters series, go to the Nevada Week section at Vegas PBS.org.

And we'll see you next week on Nevada Week.