June 18, 2020
BioPharmGuy News
Sponsored By:
Cenetron is back sponsoring another cool newsletter for you. In addition to offering central laboratory services, they provide custom solutions tailored to fit each clinical trial's unique parameters. Also they do 24-hour turnaround time for custom specimen collection kits, standard next-day domestic shipping, and same-day sample pull-and-ship. 

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BioPharmGuy

Addition & Attrition
Not much action as far as adds and drops - we added 11 companies and removed 24 due to our monthly cull of companies whose websites have disappeared. Summary available on our downloads page

Inept Job Seeker of the Week
Name: xxxxx
Email: xxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com
Comments: JOB IN INJECTALE PLANT QC DIPARTMENT IN HPLC DEPARTMENT
---
Are there countries in the world where you can send a single line, all caps email riddled with misspellings and expect to have more than a 0% chance of getting a job? We don't even employ anyone to do science, but we get job applications from overseas like this all the time. Suppose it's the price we pay for showing up near the top of Google results for "biotech companies in america".
Industry
NFlection Therapeutics
According to the headline of their press release, this company " launches with a $20M Series A ". The use of the word 'launch' in biotech press is always interesting - the headline probably made you think this company is new. Nope, founded in 2014. The funding definitely takes them to the next level, but launching a company six years after founding it is not really compatible with standard usage of the English language.

RADLogics
More than any other country, companies in Israel love to pretend they're based somewhere they're not. Too many examples to count. The latest we discovered is RADLogics. They're an AI-software company that is 10 years old and "based in Boston, MA, US, and Tel Aviv, Israel" per their website

Funny, the state of MA business directory has never heard of them. Their company LinkedIn page also says they are based in Boston, but lists a total of six tech employees at the company, all in Israel. Additional employees listed on LinkedIn are a General Manager in Cleveland, a CFO in Washington DC, a Chairman/Founder in San Francisco & a Director of Marketing in Florida. Not a single Boston employee listed, but yeah, sure, they're based in Boston. 

Vedanta Biosciences
They landed another $12M funding round recently. This was classified as a series C round. Prior three funding rounds were a $16.6M series C in Sept 2019, an $18.5M series C in May 2019 and a $27M series C in Jan 2019. Yes, they did four consecutive Series C rounds spanning 17 months. So much more of the alphabet to explore and yet they're stick on C. Switch it up already.

ArrayIT
CEO was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy to commit health care fraud. His company is a pinprick blood testing company and apparently they were offering a COVID-19 diagnostic to go along with an existing allergy test which they marketed back in March. Unfortunately, said diagnostic didn't yet exist, so marketing it was kind of a no-no. 

Then when it did exist, the FDA said it would not meet the emergency use authorization and so they wouldn't be able to sell it. CEO may have forgotten to mention that to everyone. Oh yeah and he also allegedly made false statements about revenue in 2018 & 2019. Sure looks like he has a tall hill to climb getting out of this.

What's the deal with the pinprick blood testing business ? CEOs think they can do whatever they want...Theranos, ArrayIt. Who's next?
Health & Science
Something Worked
We have news of a treatment saving lives. Dexamethasone , a commonly available steroid, which has been given to many ventilated patients has been shown to save lives of a portion of people who have reached the ventilator stage of COVID-19. It's a generic drug, so it costs maybe $50 per life saved. It won't help people in the earlier stages of the disease, but then again you can't really save a life if a person never nears death.

Worth remembering - they haven't published data so it's probably not as good as people are making it sound. It's the way of the world now, for better or worse.

This is a good reminder as to why we need public health bodies like the WHO & NHS who do not have a profit motive - no drug company would have bothered with a trial like this since you can't profit from this drug.

Rise and Fall (and Rise?)
We are now three weeks past Memorial Day, which was when most people in America decided things were back to normal. Despite this, we are still seeing falls in COVID-19 cases, sometimes drastic, in the Midwest over to New York up to New England. We are also seeing continued increases in case counts for the warmer states. Maybe there's something to that indoor/outdoor theory we pulled out of our butt last week. (The theory is that people have retreated indoors in hot weather states and are thus in closer proximity and passing coronavirus around, while they are outdoors more often in the cooler states and not in close proximity right now)

If we're going to follow that thread we pulled, we need a baseline so we can compare things as time goes on. Using NPR data on case counts for last week & three weeks ago plus Wikipedia population numbers and Google's average highs for June in U.S. cities we made a couple charts. We have excluded any states that had fewer than 20 cases last week or three weeks ago since a family of five could single-handedly change the whole data point. Excluded states: Hawaii, Montana, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming, Idaho & West Virginia (collectively 3% of the US population).

This first chart compares the average June high temp in various states vs. % increase in cases over the past several weeks:
85 degrees is a pretty glaring break point on this chart. States that average below 85 as a high for June are almost entirely to the left of the Y-axis meaning cases are dropping. However, above 85 degrees we are clearly seeing the opposite. A single warm state saw cases drop, and then by only 16%. There are a few moderate temperature states in the lower right region who are indeed seeing case counts increase - the three below 80 degrees with increasing cases are the three west coast states.

People in relatively untouched states have plenty of diagnostics available and they are using them. So let's look at cases per million residents. This second chart shows average high June temp for each state vs number of COVID-19 cases last week per million residents.
A decent trend line with only a couple outliers. (Arizona & Nevada are the high-temp outliers, though their outlier status probably is due to how ridiculously hot those places get - anything over 95 is inside weather for a sane person)

Keep in mind, this is all just correlation stuff, and does not prove anything. But more and more studies are pointing to proximity as being the main driver of this disease. Surfaces seem to not matter as much as people thought.

How will we be able to tell, from aggregate state data like this, if proximity is mostly all that matters? Well, we can't with 100% certainty, but we saw that average high temps of 85 degrees seemed to be a pretty clear separation between states right now. (That also happens to be about the temperature where BioPharmGuy personally heads for the A/C.) The great thing about the weather is it changes. Midwest over to New York will be at that 85 degree high next month. Will we see an uptick in those states as people retreat indoors to that sweet, sweet A/C? We will let you know on July 15th.

Full data from this analysis available on our downloads page.

Cleaning up the (Science) Streets
Charles Lieber, esteemed 'University Professor' at Harvard as well as a former chair of the chemistry department has been indicted for lying to the feds. He allegedly signed up to China's Thousand Talents Plan, which is designed to attract star scientists to their university campuses. He apparently agreed to 9 months of work for a salary of $50k/mo plus $158k living expenses and $1.5M to establish a lab at Wuhan University of Technology. Well, turns out he never told his employer about all this and when the feds came knocking he denied it. Oopsie-doopsies!

He was nabbed as part of an NIH investigation into foreign influence on research, mainly focused on the Thousand Talents Plan. The NIH has provided a summary which indicates of 189 scientists of concern whose institutions the NIH contacted, 29% have resigned or been terminated, 81% had some sort of NIH violation & 41% were banned from future NIH grants. 

Hydroxycholoroquine 
The FDA has rescinded their Emergency Use Authorization for hydroxychloroquine in conjunction with remdesivir. Remdesivir has been shown to reduce symptoms, but hydroxycholoroquine seems to interfere with that activity. So not only is hydroxychloroquine probably not making people healthier, it's actively preventing other medicines from doing so as well. What an ass of a drug.

The WHO has re-started their hydroxychloroquine study after some of the data used to discontinue it was found to be suspect. So we may eventually get a definitive answer to this question of whether a random drug is magic just because the President wills it.
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