Enochian Biosciences
This drug company, whose co-founder was detained in a murder-for-hire plot, came out with the shocking news that maybe that guy wasn’t very trustworthy. They claim he falsified data in a few animal studies. But don’t worry, you can still trust the company’s other data. No doubt they had perfect control of everything else happening at their organization. Other than the murders.
Coup Coup for Pfizer Bucks
After the Russian invasion and subsequent destruction of parts of Ukraine, Pfizer pledged to donate all their Russian-derived profits to Ukrainian causes. The first tranche of donations amounted to $5M and was spread out across eight NGOs.
A cynic may point to how small $5M is for a company that brings in that amount of profit every... (furiously presses buttons on calculator)...84 minutes, but it’s hard to argue with the Robin Hood act of taking from Russia to give to Ukraine. This is a well-constructed PR coup that also maybe helps the people of Ukraine avoid an actual coup. Nice work, Pfizer!
More Like Crapto
How can we improve the drug discovery business beyond the latest and greatest AI/Machine Learning techniques? How about we throw in some fake money and pretend that’s an improvement? Vibe Bio is utilizing a “decentralized autonomous organization” to build a “global community of patients, scientists, and partners around a shared mission to cure rare diseases”. Why yes, there will be a worthless crypto token involved!
The implication in their pitch is that getting money to the right projects is what's holding back drug breakthroughs, so having donors and scientists all in this new ecosystem together will solve that problem. Man, they couldn’t be more wrong – there has been an enormous amount of funding available for the past half decade. If anything, there has been too much money, funding too many ideas, causing top talent to be spread too thin and making recruiting enough patients to run a good clinical trial too difficult.
They’re not the first and won’t be the last to try to ride the fumes of the crypto-zeitgeist into the biotech world, but as profit-making businesses, these things are magic-fueled utopian dreams. If you ever contest the logic of these NFT/crypto creations to one of the true believers, they will inform you that you simply don’t understand. However you understand it perfectly well - it is an enormous load of bulls**t.
Now, NFTs do have a potential place in science, and here's a good example: Penn is 'selling' an NFT to fund research. You may recall, in years past, money given to a university for research purposes used to be called a 'donation'. Often the donor would be compensated with a truly non-fungible gift, such as their name on a building. Why bother putting a name on a building when you can email them a JPEG instead? Nice work, Penn!
Voltron Therapeutics
Nothing screams professional like naming a biotech company after a 1980s cartoon series about transforming machines. If you think perhaps the name of this company and the old Voltron action figures is a coincidence, consider Voltron Therapeutics says they are working on self-assembling vaccines and the Voltron action figures were famously known to self-assemble into a bigger robot.
When you think about it, cancer is pretty much a supervillain, so naming yourself after some heroes does make some sense. And at least it's not Go-Bot Therapeutics.
OnCusp Therapeutics
This a relatively new company whose tagline is “We bring oncology innovation to life”. Innovation sounds great. So what sort of innovation might this Manhattan-based biotech company be pursuing? Answer: they buy existing molecules and put them through clinical trials. Wow. Such innovation!
Not that it’s a bad business model or anything, but innovation, it is definitely not. In fact, it’s about the least innovative idea in the entire biotech industry save for targeting amyloid in Alzheimer’s.
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