January 23, 2020
Welcome to our Newsletter
We have been thinking about launching a general interest newsletter for a while now and so here we are. Thanks for being among the first to subscribe. We are a little surprised at how quickly people have signed up, so we are kind of hitting the ground running - please bear with us when we trip up.

Speaking of tripping up, if you were previously subscribed to our CRO/Service provider newsletter you should have received our email last week asking you to sign up for that same newsletter with our new email provider. Unfortunately, some people seemed to have signed up for this general interest newsletter on accident (probably because the sign-up box for this list popped in front of the *correct* sign-up box). If you meant to sign up for only the CRO/Service Provider newsletter, head to the bottom of our Service Provider Newsletter page and sign up there (and ignore the pop-up this time!) Sorry for that gaffe. Still trying to figure out how to best use our new provider's features

If you ever have recommendations, you should be able to send them along by replying to this email. We know everyone gets about a million newsletters these days, so we want to make sure we offer something useful - the best way to find out what's useful is to hear from actual users.
Website News
New Data Field Available

We have just about finalized a new data field for purchase - we now have links to company LinkedIn pages in our database. If you have previously purchased our data, let us know if you would like to add this data field. If you had no idea we have more company data than what we publish on our website, hurry to our database page now and read all about it.

Expanded Medical Device Coverage

We have been diligently adding medical device companies for months and frankly there are now too many of them to leave as one giant category. We are planning to split them into five or more categories. Definite sub-categories are Surgical Devices, Implants & Imaging. (Diagnostics already has its own category.) If you have suggestions on additional sub-categories, please let us know - we want to split them in the most useful way.

Random Fact

The BioPharmGuy database contains 18 companies, living or dead, who have XC as the first two letters in their name.
Industry
Theranos
We'll presume you aren't living under a rock and have heard of Theranos. This week there were a couple news items related to that whole saga. First, their former HQ is now being remodeled to be part of Stanford's medical school. Second, Elizabeth Holmes apparently called in to a legal hearing in Arizona without lawyers present - she hadn't been paying her attorneys on that case for a year so they asked off the case back in September. Yikes.

EQRx
Speaking of companies financed based on outlandish dreams, EQRx just announced $200M in funding. EQRx is predicated on the goal of getting TEN medicines approved in TEN years and charging less for the final products than competitors. Alarm bells should always go off if someone is looking to disrupt the *processes* used in the heavily-regulated drug industry.

Derek Lowe provided a much better (measured) takedown of this idea than we ever could, so check that out. To us, investors are basically buying into the idea that tens of thousands of research scientists, many with shoestring budgets and an incentive to innovate, are just too stupid to figure out how to make these processes faster/cheaper/better. It's lunacy. Even if you *could*, why would you do that from a business standpoint? It's like attempting to be the fastest, strongest athlete and then taking a lower salary than everyone else. But hey, not our money.
Health & Science
Wuhan Coronavirus

STAT has very good coverage of the Wuhan coronavirus and is making it all available free. Chinese authorities have reported the virus seems to have spread from a patient before showing signs of illness. Chinese scientists also state an estimated incubation period of 4-5 days meaning that's how long a person could be spreading it before knowing they have it. (The WHO thinks it could be as long as 10 days).

The WHO is also estimating an R0 of 1.4-2.5. R0 measures how many cases are spawned by each existing infection. So R0<1 means infections will dwindle naturally. Common cold is in the 2-3 range. Measles is ~18. Preventive measure can bring that R0 down, so it could be brought down below 1.

Taken together, it seems containment is a long shot at this point, especially considering it's in 15+ countries already in addition to basically everywhere in China. Johns Hopkins has a nice map tracking the spread.

The early reported fatality rate of 3% will certainly drop (hopefully by a lot) once more information is available about asymptomatic (and thus uncounted) infections.

Any vaccine created and tested on a compressed schedule is unfortunately still many months away. It will likely be government funded and driven. But don't tell that to the people buying stocks of the handful of drug companies who are sort of testing products that might kind of work on this disease a little bit. Or even not at all.

Hopefully we have some better news on that front next time.
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