February 27, 2020
BPG News & Notes
Website News
BioPharmGuy was struck with the flu this week. Sorry for the delay in sending the newsletter today.

If you work in sales and marketing and have already been through our directory many times, it might be worthwhile to sign up for our Weekly Update . For ~$10/mo we send a spreadsheet of all the new companies we add each week. May save you a lot of digging through our pages.
Industry
Esperion Therapeutics
Ahhh we love midwesterners....Esperion just got their new cholesterol drug approved and priced it *lower* than everyone expected. That's a new one in the drug industry.

This company has an interesting past - the original Esperion Therapeutics was bought out by Pfizer for $1.4B in 2004. Wikipedia states it was a defensive maneuver to prevent their cholesterol drug from seeing the light of day (Lipitor-hegemony). Pfizer gave up on that drug, but former Esperion employees bought back rights to another cholesterol drug as well as the "Esperion" company and re-started in 2008. They went public in 2013 and now they have an approved product. Not a bad path.

Karius
This company is working on detection of infectious diseases in blood. They just received a $165M investment from SoftBank's VisionFund 2 . Once upon a time getting that SoftBank backing would have been magical. Ever since the whole WeWork debacle things have changed. They still have money, so may as well take it. Really SoftBank is probably just another in the long line of lucky investors who are hailed as geniuses. They invested $20M in Alibaba in 2000 which turned into $60B 14 years later. That's some crazy luck.

PixarBio
Founder and former CEO Frank Reynolds was sentenced to seven years for defrauding investors. Where do you draw the line when a CEO is overhyping their company's drug? Basically everyone does that as we can see by companies launching IPOs before even entering clinical testing. Mr Reynolds did suggest he cured his own paralysis (despite there being no evidence he was ever paralyzed), so maybe that's where the line is drawn. At one point he had his own website to tout his innocence. It was pretty funny. Wait, what? It's still up! Comedy gold right on the landing page: " I was paralyzed in 1992, thru my own R&D I restored my function "

Health & Science
COVID-19
In some disappointing news, the walls for this disease seem to be crumbling even more quickly than anticipated. 

We now have outbreaks in South Korea, Italy & Iran. Government ministers in Iran have it. The most troubling thing here is these countries are reporting cases and then almost immediately reporting deaths. In China we have seen it takes some time to progress to that point, so these countries were not aware of this virus being present until patients were to the point of almost dying. That leads us to believe it's been in these countries for weeks now, which means it's probably impossible to contain. The CDC director has chosen to publicly agree with that assessment . We commend the honesty and clarity from the CDC.

The CDC's ultimate boss, not so much. Downplaying what is probably the biggest health catastrophe in the last century while simultaneously talking about stock markets is just about as tone deaf as it gets, even when tone deaf is your native tongue.

Despite the writing being on the wall, the WHO still will not call this disease a pandemic . Who knows how many countries it has to be spreading in to make that call, but it's only a matter of time.

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