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BioPharmGuy
The Name Game
We took a look and we list 919 companies in our database who have changed their names. A name change used to be a rare proposition, but has become more common in recent years. We weren't sure just how much it had changed, hence this little exercise. Here is a chart of the number of companies we list that changed their name, by year of name change.
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You can see these re-namings have skyrocketed from ~12 per year back in 2010-2012 to ~77 per year the past couple years. 2020 is an anomaly in all things, so we doubt that drop is going to be real. Anecdotally it has become a more common tactic to rename a company when doing a new funding round - sort of a shady rebirth.
In fairness, we don't list a year for all companies that changed their names, so it is very possible that recently we have just been a little better at adding dates, but it wouldn't explain this huge increase.
Addition & Attrition
14 companies added, seven removed. This week's summary file available on our downloads page.
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QED Therapeutics
Hey, remember a couple weeks ago when we featured the ridiculous "Brady Bunch" team page? Check this one out - QED Therapeutics opted for video clips of their team members. Awkward to even look at.
Merck
Operation Warp Speed now has a 7th vaccine candidate which will be a live-attenuated version. It would be a single dose and relatively stable which would solve the cold chain nightmare that is going to exist with the mRNA vaccines from Moderna & Pfizer/BioNTech. Also important is this latest vaccine is of a type that has been produced for decades. All signs point to this being a Merck vaccine in development, but OWS hasn't yet made that public.
Surgical Robotics
"12 surgical robotics companies you need to know" That's the kind of clickbait we fall for at BioPharmGuy - we always check it out to see if maybe they have some hot new unknown startup we can add to our database. In this case, however, it was just a list of the 12 most enormous medical device companies. Wow, what a unique and useful collation. Thanks for nothing.
R...you going to the mall today?
Cognoptix, a 19 year old company working on...probably something, just landed a Series R funding round. Yes, that is R, the 18th letter of the alphabet. How does a company survive into its 18th funding round, you might wonder? Who the hell knows. Maybe a few of the early funding rounds were denominated in Schrute bucks. Or Stanley nickels.
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Ian Haydon
Ian was one of the first enrollees in the first Covid-19 vaccine trial in the U.S. He kept people up to date via his Twitter feed. He recently penned an op-ed in which he asked "What’s the point of developing a vaccine at 'warp speed' if most Americans refuse to take it?"
His rise from semi-Twitter fame among early Covid-watchers to an op-ed in the Washington Post is pretty neat. He addresses some of the issues around politically-pressured vaccine timelines. As he states: "Science does not happen on a fixed schedule."
The Mood to Exclude
Once these clinical trials for Covid vaccines are done, you'd think we would quickly inoculate the most susceptible people - the elderly. Well, then maybe it would have been a good idea to include them in the trials. Unfortunately, every vaccine clinical trial was structured to preferentially exclude them. If we don't have old people in the trials, how do we know the same dosage works for them? Guess and check?
Of course, excluding old people is a good way to ensure deaths are rarer in the trial since old people die more often than young people. It's worth wondering if this is part of the exclusion motivation on the part of these vaccine companies - any death in a clinical trial is a PR nightmare even if it's not due to the experimental treatment.
Intermittent Fasting
One problem with weight-loss strategies and more broadly, health-related claims about food (coffee extends lifespans, wine is good for you, etc.) is the lack of controlled studies. You can't simply compare people in Greece to people in Louisiana and say "the diet is the difference!". It's not possible to have any idea which of the 100s of things that differ between populations may cause which health outcome.
The best you can do is isolate one variable and run a trial. Problem with diet-based trials is they are very hard to get people to adhere to. Ethan Weiss has given it a shot. He had been personally dabbling in what's known as intermittent fasting for seven years, but the fact that there was no controlled trial proving it worked as a weight loss method eventually bothered him enough to run this trial.
The key to his trial is the control group. How it went was a bunch of people signed up for a weight loss study (and thus all participants in the trial wanted to lose weight), and then half are told to just try to eat better and be healthier. The other half are assigned intermittent fasting, ie eat whatever as long as it's between noon and 8:00 pm.
After three months, the intermittent fasters had shed 1.17% of body weight, which sounds decent. But then there's that pesky control group. They shed 0.75% of their body weight. So the improvement over the control group was only 0.42% of body weight. If you weighed 250 lbs, that difference is an extra pound, which may not be worth the considerable annoyance of intermittent fasting for three months.
14% Explained
14% of severe Covid cases show a lack of type 1 interferon whether due to a genetic problem or rogue antibodies recognizing an individual's own interferon and disabling it. Given this discovery, it would be prudent to limit convalescent plasma donors to those who do not have these auto-antibodies since that would negate the whole positive impact they may have.
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Featured Job
Sales Associate - Astrolabe Diagnostics
Astrolabe Diagnostics is looking for their first Sales Associate to develop territory business plans, prospect for customers, and close deals on their SaaS analysis platform. This is a full-time, remote position. The ideal candidate will have a biology or bioinformatics background and an interest in sales. Honestly, if you're reading this newsletter, you're probably a good fit. Here's the LinkedIn post and you can apply at careers@astrolabediagnostics.com
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Etc.
Recipe Filter
If you're like most people, when you Google search for a baked ziti recipe you're not too interested in hearing about a mommy-blogger's honeymoon in Tuscany or the pickiness of her 'kiddos'. Good news for you - a Chrome extension exists to help you solve this age-old problem by creating a popup at the top of the page with the recipe in it. Maybe 2020 isn't all bad.
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