For one final time, thanks again to
BioCentriq
. If you haven't checked out their offerings yet this it your last chance. They're a New Jersey Institute of Technology-affiliated CDMO offering cell & gene therapy manufacturing and development services.
BioPharmGuy
PPE
Judging by the quantity of PPE-related spam we have been receiving, there is no shortage of masks available from China. Probably getting 100 spams each week on the topic. We are longing for the day when the spammers get back to shilling garbage conferences in countries you can't find on a map.
Addition & Attrition
We added 22 companies this week, and removed nine. Summary file available on our
downloads
page as always.
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SutroVax/Vaxcyte
This company
changed their name
to Vaxcyte on May 21 then filed for a $100M IPO the next day. The $281M of prior funding just wasn't quite enough to get a drug tested in a human. Retail investors will undoubtedly not care one iota.
Normally we see biotech name changes for three reasons:
1) Redefining their mission
2) Helping them stand out
3) Running away from their past
Thy are still vaccine-oriented so not a mission change.
We already list Abcyte, Acyte, Allcyte, Amorcyte, Arteriocyte, Astrocyte, Cellcyte, Chromocyte, Curacyte....34 more in the middle here...Veracyte, ViaCyte, ViraCyte & Xcyte. In total, a ridiculous 47 companies in our database already use the suffix "cyte", so not really helping the company stand out.
Seems like #3 is the winner here.
Merck vs. Merck
Speaking of companies needing new names, we could do with a renaming of one of these damn Mercks. For those that don't know, Merck was started in Germany in the year 1668 (for real) and created a US office in 1891. WWI led the US to split that American location off from the main company. Ever since, we have had two independent Mercks who have rights to the Merck name in different countries. Among the differences between the companies is one (US) uses a pretty normal, if boring font in its logo:
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while the other (German) uses some sort of mutant Comic Sans:
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They've been fighting these name battles for over a century now. The latest is a
win for German Merck
(aka Merck KgAA).
You'd think one or the other would be willing to pay big bucks to have the other switch names. As is, German Merck uses the name EMD Serono in US/Canada and American Merck uses MSD outside of US/Canada. Two companies both using two names in a globalized era is just bonkers. Seems like a steel cage match would solve this problem...two Mercks enter, only one emerges.
Gilead
A 600-person phase 3 trial of remdesivir
concluded
. The population here was moderate COVID-19 pneumonia patients. Patients on the 5-day dosage showed a statistically significant improvement in symptoms at day 11. (Study made no mention of improved recovery) Strangely, patients on the 10-day dosage did not show the same symptomatic improvement. This is one of the reasons phase 3 trials usually have far more patients enrolled. In summary, another small data point that shows remdesivir lessens symptoms, but no proof it can save lives.
Moderna
Ok, so keeping us abreast of results from EIGHT patients was soooooo important a couple weeks ago they had to do a press release, but 17 days later they still don't have another eight patient blood samples analyzed? GTFO.
While the stock price was still bubbly last week, the CFO sold another $10M, CMO sold $8.3M and early investor/creator Flagship Ventures cashed out one
million
shares at ~$68 each. But don't worry, that phase 1 data they aren't showing us is surely rock solid. They say we just have to wait for the journal article to come out. Moderna sure picked a funny time to publish their first
ever
journal article in lieu of another press release. Nothing to see here, folks!
Moderna had all this bad press about execs selling stock and that's never a good look. But we got to thinking - what if these executives just always sell this much stock - maybe the stock sales had nothing to do with Moderna's goosed stock price. So we scoured their SEC Form 4s, created some charts and here we go with the key players:
First up are the CEO & President. Pretty boring - these guys had been selling stock all along in consistent or at least pattern-less increments.
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Next up is the CTO. You can see he made nine sales before the Preliminary phase 1 announcement. None for more than 30,000 shares. Then less than a week before that phase 1 data was released he decided to sell almost 130,000. I guess you can't blame him for capitalizing on that news release since he sold prior, but maybe he just timed it wrong.
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The CFO is not as interesting since he has one foot out the door and is quitting in August. (Last minute update - two feet out the door - they hired a new CFO today. Actually Kim will continue to work for the company until August) May as well sell high, right?
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This one...well, this next one
stinks.
The Chief Medical Officer is the person most privy to how clinical studies are going. And here we have an individual who had sold 100,000 shares in 2019, but then didn't sell more than 20,000 at a time until magically deciding to sell 125,000
three weeks in a row
just before and after this preliminary phase 1 data for eight patients was released. Whoo boy.
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Someone at Business Insider didn't get the memo on what's going on at Moderna. They've labeled them "
one of the most important startups of all time
". Calling that statement hyperbolic is not strong enough. Reminder - they've never had a product approved and we don't even know if their technology works. Last time we heard something like that it was about a company called Theranos. Remember them?
The science does make sense, but we can show you a list of 2000+ biotech companies for whom the science made sense that are now
dead and gone
. Science making sense is nothing. Just because Moderna rasied a ton of money does not mean they are an important company (cough*Theranos*cough). All Moderna has proven is they can convince people to give them money - and lots of it. Until they show late stage data proving their therapies work, they are just another flashy biotech with no track record.
Immunomedics
In April, they hired a UK-based CEO who then had trouble moving to the US due to travel restrictions. As a result, he
will not be the CEO
anymore. For his trouble, the company is paying him $1M plus 18 months of free health care plus six months of job searching assistance (or as they call it for C-level folks, 'senior executive-level outplacement services').
Hmmm, if you got hired by a company, then couldn't get to the country where the job was located, do you think they would pay you a year's salary? Guessing 'no' on that one.
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Fake it til you make it
Almost anyone who has worked in a bench research lab knows that a bad actor could pretty much totally fabricate all their results and no one would know unless the finding was important enough to try to replicate. The sad truth is, at least 90% of scientific papers are inconsequential and no one would ever consider replicating them. So we know a minority of people are getting away with some chicanery, because people are people and they need grants, tenure, etc.
But this story here is a little extra disturbing. Apparently there is a vast market in China for fake data because eight papers, all out of China from different authors, studying different cancers, at different hospitals used identical graphs and data analysis to support their work, just with different labels. One look at
these charts
and you can tell they are 100% faked.
WHO needs US?
Donald Trump sent an unpublished letter to the WHO requesting various reforms and gave them 30 days to comply. In true Trumpian fashion, he waited about a week and declared they had not met his demands and therefore he would be
severing all ties
with the WHO during the greatest worldwide public health catastrophe in living memory. Why? Mostly because he feels China, which has 18% of humanity living within its borders, has too much sway.
It's not clear if Trump has the authority to unilaterally do such a thing, but if he does get his way, one thing is for sure - China's sway over the WHO will increase greatly with America's absence.
News Alert: Feds made a good decision
After last week's debacle whereby BARDA awarded up to $812M to a no-name startup, they have followed up with a
$628M award
for existing government contractor and longtime vaccine maker Emergent BioSolutions. This makes infinitely more sense and Emergent is probably
the
most ideal company to get an award like this. Too bad they had to waste that $812M on a glorified middleman to get here.
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