BioPharmGuy News

September 15, 2022

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Recorded another podcast. Will let you know when it's unleashed upon the world.

-BPG

This Week in Feedback

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Annual Funding Summary

You probably see our monthly funding summary every so often up in here, but a valued reader asked if we have charts of monthly funding over time. We don't, and we only keep three months posted at a time on our downloads page. But here's a chart of monthly funding to date this year, complete with a redundant title that we are too lazy to change at this point:

(Note: These are the numbers that appeared in our newsletter. Missed funding trickles in as time passes, but this should be a good apples-to-apples comparison of monthly funding trends in 2022)

That January number was skewed by a single company receiving an ungodly $3B in funding. So really, excluding that single funding event, numbers were mostly flat in private rounds until August. Is that a seasonal effect of summer vacation? Guess we will find out in a few weeks.

And the IPO market went from tepid to ice cold real quick. June/July/August totaled $28M in IPOs.

Companies Added & Removed

Did our monthly purge and said goodbye to 37 companies. Also added 17.

Best new name:

Stratosvir

Second best new name:

ChitogenX

Most Sensibly Removed Company:

Checkmate Pharmaceuticals

Summary file of additions and removals available on our downloads page.

Industry

Website Roast - Nanotics

Nanotics made a website. Sort of. It's not quite ready yet, so they decided to include a landing screen letting you know this site won't work on any mobile device and also you'd better have a huge monitor with HD resolution if you want it to work at all. (The hell kind of website are we about to peer upon?)

As you enter, you are treated with what feels like an iOS mystery point-and-click adventure game ala The Room. Click a notebook tab and, if you’re lucky, it might even open. That font is almost unreadable. There's a tab for Contact, yet it contains no contact form. Ugh, maybe next time they might consider creating the website then launching it.

For a company that put out a press release five months ago, this is ridiculous - plenty of time to get this thing working. That said, even if it did work, it would still be the most overwrought site we've ever seen. 2/10

Broke Beggars

This is a new one - a broken link leads you to a page with a "Donate Now" button. Thankfully it appears to be mislabeled and is actually a newsletter signup. But what newsletter? Do you dare throw your email into the digital abyss to find out?

Thought Leader in the House

As always, referring to oneself, or one's employee as a Thought Leader is as cringy as calling oneself a genius. As stupid of a term as it is, it must be bestowed from without and cannot be self-ascribed. And just so everyone knows, the requirements for being a Thought Leader are pretty much the same as the requirements for getting admitted into THE™ Ohio State University – a pulse. (Go Blue!)

EpiVax

Aside from throwing the best BIO reception BioPharmGuy attended, EpiVax has been doing some fundraising – FDA just awarded them a $2M grant to “validate a method for immunogenicity risk assessment of host cell proteins (HCP) for improving biosimilar product development and assessing product interchangeability”. Hmm. That doesn’t sound as interesting as margaritas & nopales taco, but if it means next year’s party will be even better, we are all for it.

Ceribell

This company's device recently got cleared for detection of a new indication: delirium.

If we’re being honest, we thought this was one of those made-up medical terms like hysteria & “the vapors”. More medically to the point, delirium is otherwise known as “acute brain failure”, which does sound like it would be an issue, but most politicians seem to survive well enough in spite of the malady.

Fierce 15

Every year Fierce Biotech releases their “Fierce 15” list of companies and our Twitter feed is subsequently filled with these 15 companies tweeting about how excited they are. But how does a company get on this list? What are the criteria to appear?

Fierce does not say, though this year they did say they will be “…focusing more than ever before on diversity in management and geography across the biotech world”

Ok, so it’s a list of 15 companies that Fierce picks, but we don’t know any more than that. If you want to see which 15 companies they pulled out of a hat this time, boom, here's the list.

This is the perfect time to announce our own initiative - next month we will be releasing the first ever BioPharmGuy Billion, where we list the top billion people in the world. Deadline for nominations is September 30th!

Oetiker® ear clamp selection guidelines

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Health & Science

Polio Reboot

Big shout out to all the anti-vaxxers out there - you did it! The US is officially a Polio-transmitting country once again. Our long 43-year national nightmare without polio transmission is over.

But seriously this is an absurd thing to have to deal with in 2022, (or whatever year it is – lost track about 2020).

The polio being transmitted is what they call “vaccine-derived polio”, which is not caused directly by the vaccine we use in America. Repeat: People in America are not getting polio because they got vaccinated.

The polio vaccine still in use in some countries contains a weakened version of polio. If someone gets vaccinated, they can theoretically transmit this weakened polio to unvaccinated individuals wherein the virus can mutate and become more infectious once again. It's rare, but possible. That's partly why we don't use it in America.

The new strain has been detected in wastewater in New York’s Rockland county, London & Jerusalem. Anti-vaxxers have targeted the orthodox Jewish communities in Rockland for many years now, winning a sizeable following. A 2019 measles outbreak was their first sign of success and now they brought us polio. Plague reportedly next on their list.

The good news is many community members in affected areas seem to be heeding the call to get vaccinated which will hopefully prevent too much permanent paralysis and disfigurement.

Powerless

California, much like its big-state-brother, Texas, has trouble keeping the lights on during extreme weather. But when stories of backup generators failing at hospitals pop up, you may stop and think about the resiliency of an energy system that aspires to be 100% electric.

Typically during power outages, hospitals operate their critical infrastructure just fine thanks to fossil fuel backups. What fossil fuels provide us is portability and instant, localized generation. In this story mentioned here, the backups did fail, due to a fuel pump problem, so they are by no means perfect. But this is a relatively rare occurrence. Generally, the odds of multiple energy systems failing are much slimmer than the electric grid alone failing.

And power grids do often fail. If we are 100% reliant on electricity for heating, cooking, transportation and everything in between, a grid failure becomes a societal failure. Hopefully battery storage solutions can address some of these concerns on a wider scale sooner rather than later, but how much lithium and other rare earths exist in the world? We can only make so many batteries.

It will certainly be an interesting decade watching how things work out in California with their top down energy restriction policies.

Ass From the Past

Often, we find ourselves wondering, ‘Where did donkeys come from?’ Thankfully a group of researchers has procured a genomic answer based on some ancient donkey bones and some modern beasts. East Africa, circa 3000 BC.

Isn't it always East Africa? Did humans and donkeys really emerge from the Rift Valley in East Africa, or is it just the place where fossil evidence happened to be best preserved? Ahh, who cares. Apologies to these researchers, but it literally does not matter where donkeys came from.

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