QPS is a GLP/GCP-compliant contract research organization (CRO) delivering the highest grade of discovery, preclinical, and clinical drug development services. Since 1995, it has rapidly expanded into a full-service CRO with 1100+ employees in the US, Europe, India and Asia. Today, QPS offers expanded pharmaceutical contract R&D services with special expertise in Neuropharmacology, DMPK, Toxicology, Bioanalysis, Translational Medicine and all Phases of Clinical Development.
QPS has CLIA-certified and GLP-compliant laboratories ready fast track novel coronavirus and COVID-19 RT-qPCR/QPCR and Serological Assays, and vaccine or therapy development programs. We're known for proven quality standards, technical expertise, a flexible approach to research, client satisfaction and turnkey laboratories and facilities. For more information, visit www.qps.com or email info@qps.com
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BioPharmGuy
Hey everyone, it's TACO THURSDAAAAAAAAAY!!! Thanks for subscribulating.
We're in project mode for the next month or so, doing a lot of maintenance on some of our contact information data fields. We also may add a psychedelics category in the near future. Far out, right?
August Funding
IPOs got a little slow last month. We tracked six for $639M. Private funding rounds stayed on their bonkers course with 36 companies netting $3.2B.
Bunch of 9-figure rounds: Abogen $700M, Laronde $440M, XTalPi $400M, InterVenn Biosciences $201M, Genti Bio $157M and PepGen with $112.5M.
Addition & Attrition
This week we added 15 companies and removed 20. Summary file available on our downloads page.
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No Jail for the Slimy (1)
The Sackler family, until now the owners of Purdue Pharma aka the fount of the US opioid crisis, were granted immunity by a bankruptcy court and permitted to keep about $5B (give or take a couple billion) earned from their death mill.
Remember when business law enforcement was about justice, not just about avoiding trials and extracting the most money out of the accused? Good times. Interestingly, consultants and advisors to Purdue Pharma were not granted immunity…apparently all those peons just weren’t rich enough to get away with murder.
No Jail for the Slimy (2)
Here’s a tip: If you obtain inside information that a drug giant is buying your company, you absolutely should not immediately buy stock in another public company working on similar stuff on the assumption that their stock will pop when your company's acquisition is announced. Especially don’t do this using your work computer.
Ah, but former investment banker/Medivation Business Development executive Matthew Panuwat apparently did not abide by this logic. He knew his company was being acquired by Pfizer and he must have known he was breaking the law when he made some options trades using that info, netting himself about $100k in the process.
Remember that time when Martha Stewart went to jail for five months because her own broker suggested she make a trade and it turned out that broker had gotten inside information? Yet this guy here is an actual investment banker/BD executive who absolutely knew better, yet the feds aren’t even seeking jail time. Wonderful system.
Possible Jail for the Slimy
The biggest circus trial in biotech history just kicked off yesterday in San Jose, CA as Elizabeth Holmes faces a litany of wire fraud charges related to her time running Theranos. It’s pretty weird out there, what with the group of women dressed as Holmes waiting to enter the court room. From that picture, it would seem exteriors of Bay Area courthouses look a lot like interiors of fashion malls in the Midwest.
The defense has placed John Carreyou, the WSJ journalist who broke/covered the downfall of Theranos as it happened, on their list of potential witnesses. Luckily he was permitted in the court room to report on the proceedings.
Unfortunately for Holmes, she lost her paper fortune when Theranos died and will thus face justice like a normal person, not a wealthy former investment banker/billionaire opium heiress. She's facing up to 20 years behind bars. Tough break. If you don’t mind having your feed filled up, Dorothy Atkins (@doratki) has a running play-by-play of the trial on Twitter.
Exelixis
Website Roast
What do we have here? A train wreck of a website, that's what. At the top is a painfully slow side-scrolling text feed. But it can't be that slow, right? Wrong. It takes 18 seconds for the 21 words to appear on the screen. 17 seconds wasted!
Next we have a giant hero logo followed by a bouncing text line letting us know they’re 60 years old. Very believable if this website is any indication.
And then comes their menu.
With the 10,000+ biotech company websites we've seen, you'd think we've seen it all, but no, this is the first time for a horizontal menu placed midway down the page. That's truly something to behold.
Can’t wait to see what they have in store for version 2.0.7 of this website!
Never Enough
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Starting a clinical study always seems to come with one thing - delays. You can avoid these, especially in the contract negotiation stage by working with JourneyCTS. They make it easy for contract analysts to stay organized with minimal overhead and allow managers to instantly pull reports and identify bottlenecks.
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But NIH said so!
If you’re in the sciences you have probably found your way to NCBI/PubMed, oh, about a million times in your career. They have the pre-eminent database of biotechnology/life sciences journal articles. Naturally, when you click an article they have stored, it has ‘ncbi.nlm.nih.gov’ in the url.
Fools on Twitter have very little understanding of…anything, and took that url to mean every article on PubMed (7,300,000 if you’re counting at home) was from NIH and therefore NIH approves of ivermectin use because some people published a meta-analysis saying it was all good. Man, that’s lazy even for an internet troll.
In another instance of Twitter brilliance, some people decided that since ivermectin is a protease inhibitor and Pfizer is working on a Covid treatment that is also a protease inhibitor, it is clearly a conspiracy to charge more money for ivermectin. Uhhh, just because two drugs work to inhibit a protease doesn’t mean they act in the same way or even against the same proteases. That’s like saying wine and water affect people the same because, hey, they’re both drinks. Wake up to Big Water's lies!
De-de-wormed
So you thought that Ohio judge instructing a hospital to administer ivermectin to a comatose patient last week was the final word? As Bernie Lomax masquerading as Lee Corso might say: "not so fast, my friend".
A higher court struck down last week’s ruling. According to that judge: “public policy should not and does not support allowing physicians to try ‘any’ type of treatment on human beings”.
The doctor who originally prescribed the ivermectin in this case is…shall we say, an interesting character. He implied that the US government failing to stop the pandemic is akin to genocide. Not sure if he’s taken a look at what’s in all those body bags, but we can assure him the virus is not picking victims based on race, nationality or culture. This doctor’s overall thesis is that prevention of ivermectin use is a conspiracy between CDC, FDA, “Mainstream Media”, Facebook & Twitter. Oh, so just your average conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands people. Totally plausible.
You know, when three dudes are arrested for murder, one almost always breaks. But sure, a hundred thousand people are all stoutly holding the line on this ivermectin suppression conspiracy to…make more people die? Get real, man.
Florida, Man
The Medicare fraud capital of the world has just racked up a new conviction. A Florida resident pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud Medicare of $73 Million. The gist of the scam was his lab testing company was offering kickbacks to telehealth doctors who would then refer patients for medically unnecessary cancer and cardiovascular genetic testing.
The 42-year old business genius behind this scheme will now face up to 15 years in jail. Gotta wonder if maybe naming the lab “Panda Conservation Group LLC” caused some extra eyes to investigate more deeply.
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