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Cheap Insulin
In an interesting and welcome turn, Eli Lilly took a cue from the Biden administration’s $35 price cap on monthly insulin costs for Medicare patients by also instituting a $35 price cap for most other people. Lilly even took out full page ads in the New York Times & Wall Street Journal to make sure everyone heard about it.
In true pharma industry fashion, the end user only gets this discounted price by going to a Lilly website, downloading a “savings card” and presenting it to the pharmacist. Shit don’t change.
This week BPG’s pharmacist ran a medicine through insurance and it was going to be $117. She then ran it through “no insurance” and it was $8. GTFO. This whole system is garbage. Blow it up.
Chicago: Biotech Hub?
For years people have insisted that Chicago is a nascent biotech hub. And for years they have been wrong. There isn’t enough going on there to call it a hub.
Will this $250M from the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative change things? It certainly won't hurt, if only to allure companies to relocate to the Windy City. (Which, incidentally, is not even among the top 10 windiest American cities.)
When it comes to biotech hubs, they typically require two large, cutting-edge institutes of biomedical research. Boston (MIT/Harvard), San Francisco (Stanford/Berkeley), Research Triangle (UNC/Duke) & San Diego (Scripps/Salk) fit the bill.
$250M is not enough to change the rules.
& Another One
Ampersand Biomedicines launched out of Flagship Pioneering this week with $50M. You may have seen we tagged them with the worst new name of the week. Why? Because there's already an Ampersand Biosciences in upstate NY. Not at all confusing!
As a result, the ampersandbio.com url was taken and AmpersandTx.com is a coffee shop for some reason. This new company ended up going with ampersand.bio
How many companies are using them fancy .bio domains anyways? As of now, 354. The best of the bunch is surely bpg.bio (wink, wink)
Rest in Z’s
On December 8, 2022, this newsletter poked fun at the company named PrinterPrezz and told them to call the Brand Institute because their name stunk.
No idea if they made that particular call, but 90 days later we see they have a new name: Zeda
And a cool url to boot: z8a.com
Big improvement - 8/10
Always Ends Well
A publicly traded drug company failed their phase 2 trial and decided to fire the C-suite and move resources towards one of their earlier stage programs.
Haha, just kidding – they’re gonna keep everyone on and do a phase 3 trial based on some post-hoc analysis.
And who can blame them? That's a winning strategy at least 1% of the time. Management definitely has stockholders’ best interests in mind!
Cybin
We’ve talked at length about the psychedelic space and how it's basically a way for early investors/founders to get rich at late investors’ expense. No one will make any money selling these drugs.
But in an odd turn for this even odder sub-industry, Cybin has paid Biospace to send out a sponsored email containing nothing but a press release about interim data on their clinical trial.
A press release is one thing but paying $3500 for a sponsored email like this is, to us, totally unprecedented for interim clinical results from a drug company.
You pay for advertising when you have something to sell. The only thing they're selling is unrealistic dreams in the form of stock ownership.
Joke's on them - stock price dropped 9% since that email went out on Friday.
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