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Who Are You
What is going on here. The website header shows the company is called ChomiX. Yet the About Us page says they are Nanjing Kolosi Biotechnology. But then in a news release they refer to themselves in the first two paragraphs as Colox Bio then Coross Biosciences.
Pick a name, already!
Big4Bio
Our friends at Big4Bio are expanding, and also tired of counting. Rather than changing their name every time they add a region, they decided the '4' is now an indication of the major industries they cover.
They plan to add DC, LA, NYC & Seattle next month bringing total covered regions to eight, though they shall remain Big4Bio.
You won't see them make fun of company websites/names/people or anything, but we highly recommend you subscribe if you want to keep track of the daily biotech news in any of those new regions or Boston, San Diego, San Francisco or Philly/NJ.
Farmageddon
In one of the most uninspired company names ever to come across our spreadsheets, here we have a company who named itself Drug Farm. Because they are 'harvesting' genetics for new drug targets. Ugh.
Not the first to invoke the farm concept, but most companies get a little cuter and say 'pharming' or something. Pharm Farm probably would have been better than Drug Farm. At least in that case, it would be clear it’s a purposely silly name.
Drug Farm seems like they were actually trying to be clever, which makes it much more painful.
Apadtilens
Normally a font change after landing on a website would be the obnoxious product of an overzealous web designer. But if your product is an intraocular lens that permanently improves a patient's vision, you get 100% approval for the blurry-to-clear text effect. Nice one!
Low TIDES Expose Seaweed
On Linkedin, we saw there was a 5K last week in San Diego in conjunction with the TIDES conference. This is the first time we’ve seen a race where male participants were given a V-neck shirt. Maybe it’s a SoCal thing? Or maybe he grabbed a women's shirt.
Money Walks
In a strange event for the biotech industry, a company whose lead drug is in a phase 2 clinical trial just announced an $80M stock buyback. To you layman, that means they took $80M in cash and gave it back to stockholders.
Let’s see – macroeconomic conditions worsening, funding drying up, regulatory uncertainty, 5% risk-free interest rates…yep, no business case for holding on to that cash at all!
There can't be a whole lot of logic to something like this as far as the company’s future success is concerned. But for insiders it could be a big windfall since the share price should, by definition, rise once less stock is out there.
In a surely unrelated fact, all outstanding stock options granted to the executives are priced at $4.13 or higher. The stock price sat at about $3.34 prior to this buyback announcement and, lo and behold, shot up to about $5 afterwards.
Nothing to see here!
Krystal Biotech
This company, who wins no awards for that moniker, had their gene therapy approved and they priced it at $24,000 per vial.
Not bad at all considering a gene therapy is effectively a cure.
What’s that you say? This drug is not curative, but requires one dose per week? FOREVER?
So, that price tag is $631,000/yr or $18 million over 30 years.
For a curative medicine, high gene therapy prices are merited – they save a lifetime of treatment. But this product is just like any old weekly drug product as far as patients/insurers are concerned. $26,000/wk for a perpetual product is simply beyond belief.
Tasted Like Sand
In an industry known for its plentiful capital destruction, even this is a pretty big one.
PEAR Therapeutics, valued at $1.6B when it went public in June 2021, just had their tech sold by bankruptcy courts for six million dollars.
They raised $400M in that market debut and over $170M prior. Where the hell did all the money go for this so-called digital therapeutic they worked on? At least a traditional drug company spends a lot of money on labs, biology & clinical trials.
Ah, who the hell cares. The PEAR is gone - stem, core, stickers, everything.
#notmymoney
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