Sorrento Therapeutics
Henry Ji, the CEO, has taken a page directly out of the Moderna playbook. He
announced last Friday
they have discovered an antibody that is 100% effective against Covid-19. They made this astonishing announcement on the basis of a *petri dish* test. Predictably, they now want government support to build out manufacturing (which, by the way, can be used to produce any antibody in the future - how convenient).
The chemistry student from Yemen who emailed us last week may have done this same thing - it's not that hard to generate an antibody that binds well to a pathogen in a dish. The hard part is finding one that works in humans. Spinning this as breaking news screams stock price manipulation.
Even if true, and even if the same results were achieved in animals and humans, a single-antibody treatment has a high chance of becoming useless shortly after its introduction. When your body recognizes and clears a pathogen, you develop a suite of antibodies, not just one. They all recognize the pathogen in different ways, recognizing different portions of it. If they only recognized one portion, a quick evolution could render the antibody useless. A single mutation could easily take this monoclonal antibody from gold to dirt. But don't tell the day-traders.
Kriya Therapeutics
Vivek Ramaswamy is a biotech investor who has proven adept at buying rejected assets from existing drug companies, plugging them into new companies and convincing investors to give him a lot of money. He hasn't been quite as successful at actually getting drugs approved, though Enzyvant is close with a drug that has a potential patient population of 20 people per year in the US. Suppose that's better than nothing.
Latest news from the family is his little brother has struck out on his own after working for Vivek since being in medical school. He
got himself $80M
for his startup. Seems like a lot of money to throw after a guy who had previous only proved himself by working for his investor brother. Looks like a good team around him, so that may be the reason for the funding.
CASPR Therapeutics
We are being inundated with 'work from home' anecdotes, but here's a new angle - CASPR Therapeutics has
rented a house in San Francisco
and 15 of its 25 employees are also living together. That'll end well.
Also in the article they said they should have a Covid-19 diagnostic ready by July-ish. What's the point when there are already like 50 on the market? Probably be a better business strategy to turn this whole thing into a Real World-like reality show.
Moderna
Moderna is running a Phase 1 Covid-19 trial, which means they are testing for safety. Yet they announced
interim trial results
(and did not provide any data) from eight people showing that neutralizing antibodies were present in the bloodstream after 43 days. The trial only involved 30 patients, so a little strange they didn't just wait to report all the results especially considering the Phase 2 trial is already scheduled so the safety trial was not really holding anything up.
So why did they announce this so prematurely? That was an open question for a few hours...at 4:30 pm the same day they also announced they would be selling
$1.25B in newly issued stock
. And there it is.
Phase 2 starts in July, so August is the earliest we can really know if the drug works.
Medical Device Success
If you have an interest in medical device topics, specifically how companies can succeed in the Covid-19 era, take a look at the
Medical Device Success podcast
. Ted Newill is covering various topics ranging from key strategies to marketing and sales tactics.
Shkreli
A federal judge
denied
Martin Shkreli's request to be allowed out of jail to discover a cure for Covid-19, Great, but when will someone set the
Wu-Tang album
free??
