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23andEveryone
Your favorite consumer genetic sequencing company, 23andMe, announced a breach back in October affecting hundreds of thousands of accounts. And now that they've had time to assess everything, the final tally of impacted users is about 7 million.
(The additional people seem to have been connections of those whose accounts were breached.)
Here we have yet another example of the modern privacy dictum: if it's digital, privacy is temporary.
Any leak is not good, but this genetic sequencing concept is a very, very interesting privacy case because even if you use a false name and submit your DNA sample to get ancestry results, someone can still figure out who you are if enough of your relatives have already been added to the database.
Throw in all those tales of people who found out dad wasn't genetically dad, and this service is becoming a real Pandora's box.
Immunogen
Thanksgiving has passed, but AbbVie gobbled up another meal, this time Immunogen for $10B. Correction, $10.1B.
That’s one of those details that makes you stop and think - what was the point of the extra 0.1?
Then you realize it represents 100 MILLION DOLLARS. That rounding error is more than the GDP of at least one country.
Team Roast - Times is Tough
Too cheap to have a photo shoot and too cheap to hire a good photoshop person. What does that leave you? Random headshots of differing focus quality with a generic elementary school photo backdrop crudely added.
Crudely added, except for that one guy with the protein structure behind him. Who'd he blackmail to preserve that amazing protein structure?
Seed Growth
Spear Bio is a Harvard spinout who brought in some funding and wants you to know. They can’t tell you exactly how much, but they can assure you it is in the tens of millions. (Ok, so $20M)
They already had a seed round, but they're pretending this wasn’t a Series A, but rather a “Seed Prime” round.
What, did Amazon lead it? C’mon, man, we know it was the A round.
If they were going to make s**t up, they missed a trick - a “water” round coming after a seed round would have been pretty neat.
It's Led
Head to this investment group's website and click the right arrow to see that they focus on "Women-Lead Startups".
Uhhh, lead is poisonous. Women-Gold Startups are where the money's at.
Added bonus - whole executive team consists of men. *Chef kiss*
Game Changer
Eli Lilly is building a co-working lab for biotech startups in San Diego which is being hailed a “game changer”.
Hmm.
Must be some new game - Johnson & Johnson did this over a decade ago in San Diego.
BIO CEO-go-round
After having two CEOs in its first 27 years, the Biotechnology Industry Organization is about to have its fourth in four years. The latest is John Crowley, a former rare disease biotech CEO.
Crowley does have a pretty cool story in that he's one of those people who started a biotech company to find a treatment for his kid's disease and actually got one approved.
Hopefully he can bring some stability to the biotech industry's most important advocacy group.
The First Noile
As a scientist you may be working towards the goal of "No illness".
As an immunologist specifically, you may adopt the mantra: "No immunity, no life".
And if you are an immunologist who starts a biotech company and wants to come up with the most contrived name possible, you may end up naming your company Noile-Immune Biotech based on:
No illness; No immunity, no life
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