July 07, 2022

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Check out jobs at biotech startups - workinbiotech.com


If you’re interested in young and small biotech companies for your next career move, check out workinbiotech.com.


The website has several categories, including Internship jobs, Research Associate jobs, Scientist jobs, Engineer jobs, and even 100% remote jobs. All companies have <250 employees, so if you’re coming from a larger company or academic institute, you can find a role with more responsibility and impact.

BioPharmGuy


Confession: Kinda of sick of reading press releases from all these psychedelic companies. Even though we have a category for those types of companies, we don’t even want to add the new ones. How in the world can any company profit from psychedelics, much less hundreds? They’re all trying to get basically the same thing approved. If it's almost certainly a losing strategy, are these really even businesses? Should we list drug-related hobbies here? They all must know the competition is basically infinite. Doesn't seem to make any sense to us from a business standpoint. But then again, what does make sense these days?


Perplexing Email of the Week

"Hey there, Do you offer dental cleaning for pets? Thank you."


Companies Added & Removed

Nine companies added, 79 removed. We did our monthly website check/purge and most of the companies we jettisoned have had websites down for many months. Some may end up being active, but we don't have time for their digital games. 


A reporter asked us a while ago if we were able to see trends in advance, at least when it comes to the number of companies closing shop and things like that. We said no - too much noise from month to month to divine anything from what we see. But 79 is quite a lot, so maybe we are seeing the late signal of a wave of closures at the smaller companies a few months ago. 


Best New Name:

Voltron Therapeutics


You Will Be Missed:

Xip Diagnostics


You Won't Be Missed

MinInvasive


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

Industry

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.

Find the story in your data.


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Health & Science

Buzzkill

A new supplement just went on sale in the UK and drew some internet love. It’s an alleged hangover preventer, which is made of a probiotic that degrades alcohol within the gut before it makes its way to your bloodstream. If true, that will definitely help prevent a hangover, but it will also prevent the other effect of alcohol that gets you feeling good, because if alcohol breaks down before hitting your bloodstream, it doesn't have inebriating effects.


Seems this is more like a product for people who feel pressured to drink alcohol, but don’t really want to get drunk. Probably not a huge market, but a market no less.


Columbia Baloney

Not exactly health or science, but earlier this year a Columbia professor blew the lid off the open secret of how Columbia has been scamming the US news rankings system. (Gonna go out on a limb and guess he has tenure.)


Long story short, Columbia systematically made decisions that skewed the US news rankings in their favor, aided severely by their status as a private school which enabled them to keep numerous bits of data private while their competitors dealt with the cleansing power of sunshine.  


The near term result of all this is Columbia will not be submitting any info at all to the upcoming US News rankings. Maybe this can mark the beginning of the demise of these meaningless rankings.


Return of the Vitamins

It’s ok if you do or don't believe in the health powers of taking vitamin supplements - arguments can be made either way. But we should all be able to agree that taking 250 times the recommended daily amount of anything is a recipe for disaster.


Some shaman had a guy taking that much vitamin D and yes, he ended up in the hospital. For comparison, his dose was equivalent to 2272 sardines per day. Even noted American hero Joey Chestnut wouldn't try such a foolish thing.

ETC.

Salt 'N' Batteries

In the future, if you find yourself headed to a dinner party where the host is one of these people who has yet to discover the exotic seasoning known as salt, there may be help for you! If things work out, you could be bringing along these electro-chopsticks which use an electric current to trick your mouth into believing the food actually has flavor. For now you might look a little weird eating your casserole with chopsticks, but some day the technology could come to a fork near you.

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