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EQRx
One of the most fanciful business models we have covered in the 2.5 year history of this newsletter is that of EQRx whose initial mission was to get 10 drugs approved in 10 years and charge significantly less for them.
It never made any sense and in fact, we pretty much said that in our first-ever newsletter.
Well, EQRx has now thrown in the towel on that cheap drug fantasy:
"...we are adapting and believe that utilizing a market-based pricing approach for our lead cancer programs, aumolertinib and lerociclib, will ensure that we can still get these important medicines to patients"
Color us shocked!
Biopharma™
The owner of the biopharma (dot) com website informed us he was selling his 100+ domains and his trademark for the term ‘Biopharma’. In this stunning wall of text on that domain, you will learn he believes the domain itself to be worth at least a million, maybe more than 2 million.
It’s normal to think the domain might be valuable, but millions? At this point biopharma is just a word, not a differentiator.
He's also selling the Biopharma trademark. A quick search of the USPTO database shows 226 results for Biopharma that are mostly active, meaning they have been awarded.
If 226 companies were awarded a trademark for a two word phrase, one of which was Biopharma, how strong is the Biopharma trademark in the first place? 226 other companies already have a legal right to use Biopharma. Never mind the companies who can use Biopharmaceutical, Biopharm, etc. That mark sure didn’t stop us from getting the BioPharmGuy trademark.
But anyone who’s worked on any sort of web property probably knows why this auction is going to fail miserably - the reality is it doesn’t really matter what your website is named. You can name an e-commerce website after a river, a computer company after a fruit, a rideshare company after a German adjective. Within reason, it pretty much doesn’t matter what it’s called. What matters is execution.
After all, you're reading a newsletter from a website called BioPharmGuy, which is a stupid-ass name, but we've gone this far with it, so no turning back now.
Team Roast - Peak Bio
You are where you worked. Or at least Peak Bio believes so – their leadership page eschews headshots and instead uses word-clouds of past employers. If you click the word cloud, you get a stock photo.
Without any evidence to the contrary, we must conclude this team is all so ugly the web designer feared they wouldn’t make it through Google’s SafeSearch filter.
@vcbrags
If you like some good rich-people-bashing entertainment on Twitter, check out @vcbrags. It’s an account that retweets venture capitalists congratulating themselves. Pretty great evidence for how money doesn’t cure cluelessness, and what better platform for something like that than the current Musky Twitter.
Cassava Sciences
If you’re in the biotech industry, you may have realized there is a long-time controversy going on that we have never touched upon directly. That would be the alleged image manipulations related to work at Cassava Sciences.
So why do we not talk about it? Easy - because we think the company and their acolytes are crazy, that’s why. If you ever come across their retail investors on Twitter you will quickly see they are definitely a cult. But now here’s some concrete evidence for the company itself being nutso: They just sued some investors who alleged they had engaged in data manipulation.
Usually, a company demonstrates its innocence and moves on. You know, by maybe showing that the images weren’t doctored. You can draw your own conclusions as to why they chose to sue someone instead.
The one time we indirectly referenced the image manipulation allegations, we stated “…authors apparently opened up photoshop and went to town” which elicited an incredulous email response from an anonymous individual who claimed to have been near the frontlines of this image work. They said it was definitely more like MS Paint-caliber stuff.
Team Roast - Epygen
Eight people on the careers page posing for a photo. How many ya' think are looking at the camera?
Four. Four?! In the digital camera era? Absurd. Three are looking up over our right shoulders and one has eyes closed. C’mon, are they even trying here? They really took that picture and said “yep, we're good”? Get out.
Tune Therapeutics
A music-themed biotech company name is fine, but if you go that route, you absolutely cannot and must not use the phrase “Join the Band” on your careers page. The groans over here are deafening. 100% unacceptable.
Illegal Procedure
Football hall-of-famer Brett Favre had already been embroiled in a scam to divert welfare funds to building a volleyball arena for Ole Miss, but he is now also embroiled in a scam to divert welfare payments to an amateurly run drug company who was working on concussion therapies.
ESPN details the whole thing, and it does not look pretty.
The drug company he invested in was doing things that were almost Theranos levels of shady. They were putting names of unaffiliated NFL doctors on their marketing slidedecks, sending out samples of unapproved drugs to NFL teams and making claims that their inhalabale drug was stable at 125 degrees (!).
Ran that 125 degrees by Derek Lowe, a real pharmaceutical chemist, and he seemed to be disinclined to believe this is a plausible claim.
And sending out samples of an unapproved drug is another level of cluelessness. FDA would lose their s**t. These clowns had no idea how to run a drug company and it shows. Luckily Favre can afford good lawyers, because he's gonna need 'em.
More Biotech Criminals
This week Martin Shkreli joined a crypto chat/podcast with some of the primary people behind all these failed and/or shady crypto companies. He began by letting them know “jail’s not that bad”. Nice to see some levity while all the suckers go broke. #freemarket
And in this week's final bit of biotech criminal news, Elizabeth Holmes’ Hail Mary attempts at getting a new trial have failed and she will be sentenced next Friday. Hopefully for her, Shkreli was being honest for a change.
Lusaris Therapeutics
As the psychedelic space becomes overfilled and retail investors less willing to gamble their life savings on federally banned substances, newer entrants are refining their marketing and staying private.
Lusaris Therapetics just launched with a $60M funding round and they aren't trumpeting psychedelics – they’re talking about serotonergic neuroplastogen therapeutics. Which is a much, much fancier and more refined way of saying psychedelics.
Team Roast - Syros Pharmaceuticals
Hover over each team member's photo to get a casual shot of them demonstrating their favorite sport.
Activities represented are tennis, golf, running, cycling, snowboarding and…foosball. Dude, if you don't participate in any real sports, you’re supposed to lie and say you like hiking.
And by the way, talk about one of the all-time great rebrands. Used to be called walking, which sounds lazy and boring. But hiking? Exciting and fun!
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