BioPharmGuy News

April 14, 2022

BioPharmGuy News

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BioPharmGuy

Domain Slangin’

Some guy from a domain broker contacted us about helping to sell a domain name. It was a so-so domain name…zzzpharma.com, where the zzz is a large American city name. They offered a $50k commission if we helped sell it. HAHAHAH. They’d be lucky to sell that domain for $5k. $50k commission would imply at least a six figure sale. Get out of the city.

March Funding Summary

IPO atrophy continues apace - one lonely company went public this month for $69M. Private market was still hot with $3.07B dished out to 68 companies. Biggest round was $200M for DNAnexus.

Excel file of March funding available on our downloads page.

Added & Removed

18 companies added, 47 removed this week. Got rid of a lot of companies whose websites have been down for all of 2022. At some point, we just have to kick them out.

Best New Name:

South Rampart Pharma

Worst New Name:

CRISPR QC

You Won't be Missed:

PX' Therapeutics

Summary file available on, you guessed it, our downloads page.

Industry

Biogen

Medicare has ruled that it will only cover Aduhelm for people participating in clinical trials. Medicare going this route on a drug targeted at older Americans means it is effectively unapproved for actual use other than for people who have an HSA worth more than their house.

This means it will likely be years before Biogen can make any money off the product and probably the only way that can ever happen is if these post-market phase IV trials go well. Considering they already ran two trials (one failed while the 'good' trial didn't show clinical improvement), maybe don't gamble too much on a positive outcome. Since that next trial is many years from completion, they've already started gutting the commercial team that was to sell this product.

D&A Pharma

After being down since April 2021, D&A Pharma’s website is back in business. Not itself interesting, but the name of this company reminds us of the time BioPharmGuy and his friend started a gutter cleaning business, which they dubbed D’n’A Gutters. Printed up some flyers, put them in the mailboxes of people with overflowing gutters…seemed like a can’t miss idea.

Then they realized they had put the wrong phone number on the flyers. And that was the end of D’n’A Gutters.

Pfizer

Due to a cyberattack, some Pfizer employees were accidentally overpaid. Pfizer graciously said they would cover the first $250 in overpayments, but the rest had to be given back. The payments were all to hourly employees who clocked in and out daily, so it's possible they didn't even realize it was happening since their paycheck may always fluctuate a bit.

As most hourly workers in this country do, the recipients probably spent it on gas. Pfizer hasn't said how much the overpayments were in aggregate, but asking for a repayment like this is more than a bit gauche coming from the company who profited $50B off a global pandemic (so far). Eat the $5M or whatever and move on, jerks.

Insud

How many times can a company reasonably repeat the same word in their mission statement? Four? Five? How about 16? That’s what Insud ended up going with. Definitely feels like about 10 too many.

Team Toast

A mere two months after being renamed Triana Biomedicines, this group already has matching jackets on simultaneous display. Now, that’s how you prove you’re not all sharing the same jacket. It's a shame that one rogue left it unzipped and another guy hid behind a head. Otherwise would have been a Team pic hall of fame nominee.

CHS Pharma

This website isn't too bad. Big image, normal looking menu, lot of content. But after all that effort, they're still using a bellsouth.net email address. Gross.

Treeline

Apologies to those in the field, but sometimes you have to wonder if HR has any idea what they’re doing. Here we have a job posting looking for someone with 0-8 years of experience.

Oh sure, those 8-year employees are basically the same as the ones with no experience whatsoever, so just throw one job posting up on the website for all of 'em - efficient!

This brought back some career PTSD from the time in 2010 when someone said BioPharmGuy was entry level despite having three years lab experience, a Masters degree, a year of industry experience & a year of FDA experience. (Told them to take their $18.50/hr and shove it. The rest is history -BPG)

Not All Roses

For a time in biotech history, every company on the verge of getting a product approved was snapped up by one of the huge established companies. This led to a deficit of medium-sized companies selling their own approved products and some bemoaned this hollowing out of the middle.

Recently, smaller companies have more often gone it alone, whether by choice or a lack of suitors. Anecdotally, they’re not having a great time of it. The latest is Zealand Pharma whose product was approved by the FDA about a year ago. This week they announced they would be cutting 90% of their US workforce and the CEO was shown the door.

Sales figures were below expectations, at least partly because building out a sales organization in a highly regulated field is just plain difficult. Maybe joining up with an established one is the best way forward after all?

Life Sciences Commercial Services Specialist

Everest follows a partnership-driven engagement model to provide complete solutions designed to improve customer relationships and performance.

With over 25 years of experience in life sciences and biopharma, we specialize in commercialization of companies with unique needs, including rare disease, gene therapy, specialty, & startups.

Providing services and platforms for any stage of your commercial lifecycle, Everest is with you for the whole climb.

Health & Science

Pandemic Profiteer

You’d think if you obtained a federal contract for $34M to deliver N95 masks which you did not have, had no idea how to obtain and also had no experience in procuring, you’d probably not invite a journalist along for the procurement trip (complete with private jet). Then again, you’re not Robert Stewart, who recently pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government and lying about being a marine.

Beyond the mask scheme, this guy also defrauded the PPP as well as the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program. (He used that disaster loan money to pay for the private jet...guy had his own fraud economy going)

He showed almost no restraint with his federal lies – kind of surprised he didn’t brag about a fake Purple Heart while he was at it. One of the oddest parts of the story is this guy is legitimately an Air Force veteran, so would have gotten favorable treatment for federal contracts anyways. He lied about being a marine to defraud yet another federal program. Some people can’t be helped.

Another Day, Another Variant

Hey guess what? A virus mutated. Again. And we don’t know anything much about it yet. Cue the drumbeat of news reports.

Currently it’s seen mostly in the UK, but you have to feel bad for them – they have the best viral monitoring in the world by far, so these new variants always seem to be more prevalent there. Almost certainly it's sampling bias, in that they are actually sampling unlike pretty much everywhere else in the world.

Penn A-cell-in

Eastern Pennsylvania is the hotbed for all cell therapy research and pretty much has been since the inception of the field. Lately they’ve been pushing the “Cellicon Valley” moniker for the region, which we reluctantly admit is some catchy marketing.

In some actual news out of Philly, a cell therapy team at Penn claims to have shortened the time needed to create CAR T cells from two weeks down to 24 hours. Impressive, but the joke’s on them – we’re going for 23 hours, baby!

Human Genome Project: Complete

You'd be excused for believing the Human Genome Project was completed about 20 years ago, because that’s what they told us. For all intents and purposes, for the time, it was complete. But what they really did was chop up many different peoples’ DNA sequences, splice the results together and call it a genome. This was much easier and faster to do and also there were parts of the genome that were effectively inaccessible with the technology of the day.

This week, people really did complete a single person’s genome, a mere two decades after everyone thought it was already done. Lesson: Science takes time.

Cornucopia of Bizarre Fish

A Russian fisherman shares his weird catches from the deep with his Instagram followers and the Daily Mail has put together a sort of greatest hits collection. Creepy as all hell, but also cool. Half these things look like they're from a sci-fi movie. Enjoy your lunch, everyone!

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