August 13, 2020
BioPharmGuy News
This week's newsletter is sponsored by American Gene Technologies. They are proud to announce the FDA has just approved the start of their phase 1 clinical trial for their lead HIV program, AGT-103T. This product is a lentiviral vector-based gene therapy which will hopefully be curative for HIV patients around the world.

American Gene Technologies will be doing a virtual press conference at 1:00 pm eastern today if you are interested in learning more. You can register and reserve your spot here: AGT Virtual Press Conference
BioPharmGuy
Last week someone did not take too kindly to our suggestion that $35 was a trivial price to pay for a vaccine that would presumably let us all party like it's 2019. They thought it should be free for everyone. We didn't really follow most of the ensuing stream-of-consciousness diatribe, but it's nice to have angry unsubscribes from both sides of the political aisle.

Longest email
We have a subscriber whose email has 28 characters before the @. 

thisistwenty-eightcharacters@biopharmguy.com

Bet that person is thankful for the web browser autofill feature.

Addition & Attrition
24 companies added, 15 removed this week. New company file available on our downloads page.

July Funding
52 private companies received funding rounds totaling $4.55B in July. We also tracked 12 IPOs for $2.65B. Biotech investors' motto: Pandemic Shmandemic. Summary available on downloads page.
Industry
Kodak
Hey, remember when a huge government contract was recently awarded to an anachronistic film company? You may want to sit down - there might have been some shadiness around that deal. 

George Karfunkel, who chairs the board at Kodak, decided to donate three million shares of his stock to an 11-month old synagogue of which he is President on the day the Kodak stock price peaked. Given that day's range, the shares were worth somewhere between $52.5-180M, which Mr Karfunkel may now deduct from his taxes as a charitable contribution. 

So he's going to pay $19-67M less than in taxes this year all for donating stock that was only worth $6M before that federal letter was announced. This means he locked in $13-61M worth of personal gains and as President of the synagogue, he still gets to control what happens to the stock, totally tax-free this time of course!

Nothing to see here. Back to work, plebeians.

Moderna
First off, we apologize. We are sick of talking about this company, but the hits just keep coming. 

This time, it turns out back in February the President of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston wrote an op-ed critical of drug pricing laws titled "Medical innovation system under assault". She conveniently omitted the fact that she was sitting on the board at Moderna at the time, receiving some juicy stock options. 

This came to light after she recently resigned from the board - the Moderna Covid vaccine will be tested in clinical trials at her hospital, so it forced her hand. She cashed out her remaining $6.4M in stock on July 17 after having sold $4M worth on May 12. She was originally appointed to the board December 2015. Assuming the board met quarterly (no idea if they even met that often, possibly only once a year), that translates to $577k per meeting to sit there and listen to the CEO talk. 

But wait, there's more. She still sits on the board at Medtronic making a a paltry $200k/yr plus stock options for that onerous gig. All in addition to her $2.6M salary as hospital President. Pretty outrageous that any hospital is letting its president sit on drug and medical device company boards. Clear conflict of interest.  

But sure, drug pricing laws are the problem. 
Health & Science
Top Companies
Last week we mentioned how we get requests for "Top" biotech companies and we never really know what the requester means. It prompted one of our readers to share a pretty cool resource. Jon Tryggvi's research group at the University of Arizona creates pdf posters depicting the structure of many of the "top" (highest revenue) blockbuster drugs. They are huge files (10+MB), but if you're on a desktop they're pretty cool to check out.

Sturgis
If you're looking for the Covid super-spreader event of your nightmares, it's happening right now in Sturgis, South Dakota. Hundreds of thousands of bikers, mostly middle-aged or older with a science-skeptic lean, are travelling from every corner of the United States to drink and party here with few masks in sight. They are already heading back to your community - sleep well! 

Feel bad for the residents of Sturgis - 60% voted to not hold the rally this year, but city council needed that sweet hog money and disregarded their wishes. Seems like everyone only loves democracy these days if they agree with the outcome.

Drugs & Money
STAT News has an impressive analysis/visual of the tentacular influence Pharma/Biotech has on US Congress. It's packaged to shock the reader into believing pharma rules the world as they donate to 2/3 of sitting congress-critters. All very titillating.

But then they point out that these companies have donated only $11M in total. That's less than the Realtor (trademark) cartel, commercial banks, cable/phone/internet, law firms or the oil & gas industry. Union donations are higher even than any of these industries. So, yeah, drug companies are trying to protect their interests, but not even as much as many other industries/groups.

The kingpin of donation recipients was no surprise - Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has racked up $200k in total from 21 of the biggest 23 American drug companies so far this cycle. As he is the main firewall blocking any sort of drug industry regulation, that makes sense. But also, $200k is basically irrelevant for a Senatorial election. McConnell has already racked up over $47M as of July meaning the drug industry is responsible for a paltry 0.4% of his donations.

Not so titillating after all.

Bill Gates Interview
Logorrheic is a word. You will discover that and more from reading this interview with Bill Gates. He's confident that by the end of 2021 the pandemic will be over in rich countries, 2022 in poorer ones. That's a pretty good estimate from a well-known realist.

Quarantine Etymology
The word quarantine derives from the Venetian word quarantena, meaning 40 days. That was the prescribed period ship-bound travelers had to wait in port before disembarking during the Black Death in the 1300s-1400s. Boom, knowledge.
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