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BioPharmGuy
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BioPharmZoo
In case you were wondering, 217 people visited our BioPharmZoo last week. Hope it was a fun trip.
Companies Added & Removed
This week we added eight companies and removed 14.
Best name added:
Oryn Therapeutics
Sad to see go:
Silk Road Therapeutics
Won't miss:
ZebiAI Therapeutics
Summary file available on our downloads page.
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Splitsville
Last week GE announced they would split off their healthcare division in 2022 and then Johnson & Johnson followed that up by saying they would split into a drug company and a consumer products company. The Twitter comedians were beside themselves making the obvious jokes about each company getting their own Johnson post-split. Don't even joke about stuff like that...I mean, two companies with the same name?? We already have two Mercks and it’s very annoying.
Actually, counting both living and dead companies we also have two each of the following:
Alpha Biopharma, Antigenics, BioMedix, Correvio, CytoMol, EdiGene, Esperion Therapeutics, Fusion Pharmaceuticals, Icagen, Immunogen, Integrated Diagnostics, Mabpharm, Maxygen, Medigen, Moma Therapeutics, Organon, Precision Therapeutics, Sovereign Pharmaceuticals, Tolerion, TransS1 & Viatris.
Maybe 70% of those are reincarnations of the original company but, believe it or not, two different groups came up with the name Moma Therapeutics about 12 years apart. Both in Massachusetts.
Mano y Mandrill
Oryn Therapeutics is a new biotech out of the Bay Area whose home page features a man and a mandrill engaged in a staring contest and states “From our evolutionary ancestors to a new world of bio-inspired therapeutics.” The company is working on “macrocyclic peptide biomolecules inspired by theta defensins, circular peptides that occur naturally in Old World monkeys”
Sounds cool, and if you’re gonna pick a visually stunning Old World monkey, the mandrill is the obvious choice. However, Old World monkeys are NOT our evolutionary ancestors. We of course share a common ancestor with them as we do with every animal (ca. 25 million years ago in the mandrill’s case), but this old “evolved from monkeys” trope wasn’t true 100 years ago and still isn’t. Biotech companies should be the last ones perpetuating it.
Biogen
Their consumer product Aduhelm, is back in the news again and as usual, not for good reasons. Word is they're investigating the death of a 75 year-old who was taking it. Certainly at this point no one can claim to know if the product is at fault – people with Alzheimer’s tend to die for myriad reasons. And really it may be unprovable in any case.
But this reminds us of the original clinical data which showed unequivocally that side effects, including brain swelling, were a very real and potentially dangerous phenomenon while those same studies failed to show if the product made Alzheimer’s patient symptoms any better. The risk/reward profile was not something that would traditionally be considered approvable, and so here they are investigating a patient death.
If that wasn’t enough, the European Medicines Agency handed down a “negative trend vote” against Aduhelm. Sounds problematic, but recall the FDA advisory committee voted 10-0 against, and it still got approved in the US, so who the hell knows what will happen.
Moderna
Last week the NIH was angry with Moderna for filing a patent on their mRNA Covid vaccine and not listing three NIH scientists as co-inventors. Moderna tried to claim they were legally forced to only list Moderna personnel as inventors, which seems to be a total fabrication. For it's part, the NIH also filed some patents and didn’t include any Moderna people on them. So who’s the real villain?
The patents are still under review, and perhaps more importantly, Moderna has realized it should not anger their main customer and has offered to share ownership of the patents with NIH. And why wouldn’t they? They already sold mountains of the product to the feds and next year they’ll probably try to tweak it and patent that new version. Bling bling.
Cocoon
Cocoon Biotech had the url madewithcocoon.com but decided to simplify things. Maybe cocoonbiotech.com? Nah, of course not – they went with madewcocoon.com
So a random 'w' in there instead of ‘with’ is somehow better? Silly. But really the joke’s on them, because after checking out their website while writing this up we decided they’re getting removed from the BioPharmGuy database for not being biotech-y enough. See ya, Cocoon!
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Vaccine Mandate
The federal vaccine mandate for large private employers has been contested by 10 states and was put on hold a day after it was to go into effect. It is now headed to the US Court of Appeals - but which one of the 12?
It always seemed a stretch to enforce a mandate on private employers like this. If there were a truly compelling public health interest, only the federal government should have the authority and responsibility to enact vaccination measures. The time and effort to build that out made it a nonstarter, which led to this attempted shortcut. Now that treatments and vaccines are working their magic, it's a lot harder to make the case there is enough of a public health interest for such extreme measures, even by the public sector. Forcing the private sector to police things now seems ridiculous.
Vaccine Rollout
Now that the Covid vaccines are universally accepted as safe and effective for adults, individual states have started to do whatever the hell they want, CDC be damned. Some are offering boosters only to the old and high-risk while others are giving them out to anyone over 18.
The youth vaccine continues to be distributed apace, but few stats have popped up on how many doses are being administered state-by-state. Hopefully one of the vaccine trackers like Bloomberg will start to get that info shortly.
The Other Scourge
The CDC just announced that the US saw a record 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the 12 month period to April 2021. Surely this will spark Congress to leap into action and commit funds and resources to attack this scourge! Haha, sure. These days keeping people healthy doesn’t get someone elected – in fact, making them ill seems to be the more common electoral gambit. Strange days.
The Great Eel Mystery
Until 115 years ago, no one even knew where American and European eels reproduced, let alone how. Johannes Schmidt trawled the deep ocean showing that eel larvae got smaller as he neared the Sargasso Sea (section of the Atlantic Ocean directly east of the US). This was confirmed 110 years later when Canadian scientists observed an adult eel in that area for the first time. Both European and North American eels reproduce here in the Sargasso.
And yet still scientists have never seen eels mate or know anything about how that all goes down, which is pretty crazy given our modern technology.
A scientist in Norway has now at least shown a reasonable explanation as to how an eel from North America or Europe can end up in the same place to mate. The theory comes down to their ability to detect not only the Earth’s magnetic field, but also it’s strength (flux). The theory is the eels retain a magnetic memory of their youthful journey away from their birthplace which they then traverse in reverse to spawn.
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ETC.
Rent-A-Hitman
When you create a fake hitman-for-hire website and show enough creativity to name it “rent-a-hitman” you’re clearly only going to fool the dumbest of the dumb. The latest to hold that title is a woman from Michigan who wanted her ex-husband dead for stealing her money. She also “preferred not to go to jail”. Neither of her two those wishes came true as she now faces up to nine years in prison while her husband is no doubt swimming in piles of her cash a la Scrooge McDuck.
“Rest assured that your information will remain private since Rent-A-Hitman is the only organization in the world that is 100% compliant with the Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964.”
Ah yes, the 1964 HIPPA act - must be legit! Over a dozen people have been busted through use of that website. Stupid will never go extinct.
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