Placing Your Drug Strategy Within a Solid Foundation for Success
In this whitepaper, we look at the broad set of trends influencing pharmaceutical development and manufacturing strategy today, and how these drivers are influencing new business models with outsourced partners. Download your copy here.
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BioPharmGuy
We are happy to announce a new partnership with our friends at Big4Bio. They cover four major biotech regions in the US with their free, daily newsletters - we have always found them useful, so this was an easy tie-up for us.
Going forward, Big4Bio will feature a hosted BioPharmGuy directory for each of their regions. You can see them in action here: Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Philadelphia. BioPharmGuy will also be the sponsor of the 'Companies' section in all the Big4Bio newsletters.
Their newsletters are more strait-laced than this show we're putting on over here, so if you're interested in the daily happenings in any of the regions they cover, they're definitely your best option. Head to their home page to learn more about what they do and to sign up for any of those regional newsletters.
November Funding
Busy month on the private side of the funding world - 54 companies netted $3.46B.
Public companies were not quite as busy - only five IPOs for a paltry $209M. How those executives gonna feed their families?
Summary file available on the BioPharmGuy downloads page.
Weekly Directory Edits
Added 18 companies, removed a couple this week.
Best new name:
Remedium Bio
Worst 'new' name:
Odyssey Therapeutics
Summary file available on our downloads page.
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Fore Biotherapeutics
This company issued a statement. We know this because the press release was titled: “Fore Biotherapeutics Issues Statement”. Since the title didn’t indicate what it was about, you knew it had to be pretty bad. It proved to be ‘CEO charged with insider trading’ bad. The silver lining was the offenses happened in a prior job. Guess that’s better than the alternative for Fore.
The alleged backstory is that while he was the CFO of a publicly traded company, he fed his girlfriend and some family members an inside tip that netted the girlfriend $67k and the family members $21k. When federal investigators came knocking, he failed to mention she was a romantic partner, and lied about having had contact with her at all during the time she made money off his insider tips.
Guy was making $1.9M a year and (allegedly!) thought this was a good idea, showing once again that money doesn't protect against stupid.
Odyssey 2
Odyssey Therapeutics launched this week with $218M to help get them on their feet. With real estate prices in Cambridge what they are, that should get them through at least a few months.
They are not to be confused with the Odyssey Therapeutics that was briefly active in Palo Alto in 2018 or the Odyssey Thera from Mountain View that shut down in 2014ish.
Odyssey joins other companies, past and present, on epic adventures such as Journey Medical, Voyager Therapeutics, Trek Therapeutics, Sojournix & Quest PharmaTech.
Boom, Roasted
In the great tradition of comedy roasts, you have to be able to take it as well as dish it. Considering our current website is unassailable digital perfection, we're looking for some opinions on one of our past, less inspired iterations. We can't even replicate the image in this email - you'll have to click over to our website for the pleasure: BioPharmGuy Circa 2009
Do your worst, send in your 'comments' via email or the contact form and we'll include the best ones in next week's newsletter. (unless you all really stink at this)
EverImmune
This French biotech company raised €5M last week. Certainly they would have liked to have snatched up everimmune.com, but someone registered that five years ago. Regardless, they stuck with the name EverImmune and settled on a .net domain, which you may be excused for not realizing was still even an option. Are they using an aol email address on their contact page too? If you have to settle on a .net domain, just pick a different company name, man.
Neurelis
They’ve hired epilepsy sufferer Rick Harrison, best known for running the shop on the TV show Pawn Stars. He will be helping to raise awareness of epilepsy and presumably awareness of the drug they sell to treat it, though that’s surely but a minor detail.
Rick has suffered from epilepsy since he was a child and seems to be a good candidate for this role. Guess now when they hit you with that $600 bill for two sprays of Valtoco, you can hit ‘em back with a “best I can do is twenty bucks.”
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Covid's Long Tail
A study out of the University of Florida, has indicated that those who survive Covid-induced hospitalized have roughly double the mortality rate in the following 12 months as those who had Covid, but remained un-hospitalized.
This increased risk was seen for those under 65 years old. More shocking is the fact that 80% of reported deaths were not for respiratory or cardiac issues. This is yet another demonstration of how little we know and how devastating the illness really is and especially how relying on 'natural immunity' is an increasingly unwise choice.
Crappy News
The Massachusetts Water Research Authority is reporting a large spike in Covid-related RNA in the wastewater system. Thanks a lot, Thanksgiving.
Booster
Study out of Israel of citizens 50+ that had been vaccinated showed those who also got the booster saw quite a reduction in deaths. Despite there being 9x as many boosted individuals, they accounted for only about 50% of the deaths in the study. This is all pre-Omicron, so no telling what it means going forward.
Master Class: Fake News
A Chinese cybersecurity company was caught having fabricated a Swiss scientist entirely, down to a computer generated headshot. Early in the pandemic they used this fake persona in Chinese state-sponsored media propaganda to enlighten the locals on the 'real' origin of Covid.
We shouldn’t be too surprised – the Chinese government was filling their domestic airwaves with fake news long before it became a cop-out phrase for politicians in the west who disagreed with reality. Best part of the affair may be the name they came up with – Edward Wilson. That sure is a Swiss (and not at all British) name if ever we saw one.
Replicability
Modern life science research has a problem. The problem is most of the results are probably garbage. Researchers perform experiments over and over and use opaque statistical voodoo to determine that results are statistically significant. As long as it’s not super important research, no one ever checks to see if it was a fluke. Until now.
This has been a hot topic for some time, but it’s not all nefarious (though certainly some people are totally faking research). Randomness pervades everything and life sciences probably more so than most areas. Because of this, statistics alone can explain many false results being published.
For example, if 20 groups run the same experiment and one sees statistical significance in their results while the other 19 do not, we only ever hear about the one because publishing negative results doesn’t advance your career. If a publisher knew the experiment was run 20 times and only succeeded once, they would be very confident the 19 were correct and the one was wrong. But if they only have the one successful study to look at, how could they really know?
There’s not an easy answer to this problem, but given the incredible number of people now doing basic science research, it's a problem that isn't going away soon.
First, Do No Arm
A dude in Italy really wanted proof of vaccination, but being a small, selfish, scared little baby, he didn’t want to do his part and get a shot in the arm...or at least not his arm. After apparently watching some camp 1980’s B-movies, he decided on the foolproof plan of using a fake arm. As you may have guessed, the nurse with 34 years of experience didn’t buy it. The local police have received a complaint from the health department, and it remains to be seen what will happen to this one-armed bandit.
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Featured Job
Clinical Research Associate - Premier Research
If you have a few years of experience as a Clinical Research Associate it may be a good time to move up a bit. Premier Research is looking for someone to work remotely (and on the road, of course) as their CRA II/Sr. CRA. Premier is a mid-sized company, so you won’t be totally lost in the shuffle like at the giant ones. The job posting is a bit extensive, but if you have a few years experience it should be a decent fit for you. Take a look.
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ETC.
Festive Salad
The holidays are arriving and what better way to get into the spirit than to look back on a neat holiday dessert recipe from yesteryear – the Candle Salad.
To create this delight, stack a couple slices of pineapple with their cores removed. Then cut off the top half of a banana and slide the base into the pineapple opening so that it points skyward - like a candle!
Now using a toothpick, attach a maraschino cherry to the top as the ‘flame’. Finally, to emulate the melting wax…oh hell no. Nope, nope, nope. That’s it, we're done. See ya next week.
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