EQRx
This is the company that launched Jan 2020 to much fanfare with the goal of getting 10 drugs approved in 10 years and selling them for drastically lower prices than comparable products. Since then they’ve gotten a bunch of money and now they appear to be ready to execute. They just signed a deal to help lower drug prices. YES! Finally!
Wait, what? In ENGLAND?? You sons of b***ches – you tricked us! They already have a functioning health care market over there. How dare you!
Moderna
The FDA is not pleased with the prevalence of myocarditis in teen recipients of the Moderna vaccine and will delay any decision until at least January. Given the supply of Pfizer vaccine and its relatively moderate myocarditis, this is bad news for Moderna. The FDA may eventually just say 'no', which is something they tend to do when a comparable product with fewer side effects is readily available.
If the FDA does decline to approve, that may mean Moderna will mint slightly less billions as a result. Scary stuff – maybe that’s why they announced it on Halloween Sunday.
What’s the deal with myocarditis anyways? It’s inflammation of the heart muscle. People who are anti-everything like to point out constantly that it is a side effect of the mRNA vaccines and therefore vaccines are death!
While it’s true that it is a side effect of the mRNA vaccine, more specifically it appears to be a side effect of the spike protein. How do we know this? Because a large proportion of unvaccinated athletes get myocarditis after their Covid infection. (There isn’t much info currently available about non-athletes or children.)
So while the risk of myocarditis from vaccination is something to consider, especially in adolescent boys and young men, it’s arguably a smaller risk profile than the option of getting Covid, plus myocarditis, plus long Covid.
Minerva Surgical
Went public last week and landed a tidy $75M. They're a women's health company and went with the ticker symbol UTRS. Nicely done!
Catalent
The firm is a contract manufacturer which is producing the Moderna vaccine and they’re hitting the media saying they need to fill 500-600 jobs in their new Bloomington, IN facility.
They specifically need entry-level workers and they’re paying a whopping $18 an hour plus benefits! Geez, this isn’t hamburger construction, this stuff requires a lot of training and attention to detail. This stuff is being injected into healthy people. $18/hr? Come on, man. Indiana cost of living is low, but Bloomington is on the high end for the state.
You could almost get $18/hr if you got a job at the Bloomington Subway that Jared frequented as he shed his excess mass. Wait a second...no, you can’t - they closed it a few months ago. But maybe you can work at the bakery that took its place which definitely has a sense of humor about it – on their own website they comment: “Goodbye Jared, you are a loser!!”
Arcaea
This company came across our radar because they’re using Ginkgo Bioworks Platform. They aren’t a company we will add to our directory because they’re doing something beauty related, but it’s another one of those brilliantly-named companies where they have to tell you how to pronounce the name in the press release. This one is “Ar-Kay-uh”. Oh Kay. 3/10
Cassava Sciences
Let's be real - 'investing' is just legal gambling with some tax advantages. And gamblers...err...investors, never want to hear from short-sellers, who exist to make money off stock prices dropping. In this instance, Cassava Sciences (formerly Pain Therapeutics) was the target of not one, but two outfits exposing what they believe to be fraudulent activities. An earlier one pointed out obvious problems with western blots and images in scientific papers. That was filed with the FDA as a 'citizen petition' on behalf of a law firm.
Just yesterday some short-selling rapscallions dropped a 40-page report explaining why they believe the company is one big fraud. The overall picture is seriously shady, but some of the information in that report is almost certainly incorrect.
For example, they claim to know the website traffic numbers as well as revenue figures for a private clinical research company. Yes, there are companies out there that will provide those numbers, but they are total guesses. For example, Similarweb thinks we had 95k website visits in August, which is about double reality. Likewise, a couple websites show estimates of our revenue to be 31k & 202k. Clearly those numbers are fabricated. There is one that guesses our annual revenue to be '<$25 million', and we will admit that one is accurate.
The short report is still a good, if long, read.
Medable
This company secured another $304M in funding to sell their clinical trial software. The weird part is where they disclose their valuation in the press release. That’s not normal in biotech. Not at all. It sounds awfully braggy...almost as if it’s important that everyone knows they’re a $2B company after netting four funding rounds in only 18 months.
Unsurprisingly, they did not publish profitability in that press release, though generally that’s how you evaluate a business that claims to have sales in “60 countries, serving more than one million patients and research participants “.
No profit numbers, but we did find plenty of hyperbole from investors:
“…at the forefront of a significant paradigm shift”, “cutting-edge innovation”, “transformative opportunity for the life sciences industry”.
Please. They’re hardly the only company trying to streamline clinical trials using software. In fact we probably list dozens. It seems this funding is more of an attempt to “buy” the market through sales and marketing spends. Hey, we don’t blame them. Get big fast, right? But this does not seem like a true tech company.
