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BioPharmGuy
In honor of amino acids, those wonderful protein building blocks, we took a look at the most common name-starting triplets for the companies in our directory.
BIO owns the top spot and it's not close and one of these top 10 name-starting triplets is actually an amino acid codon. (PRO for proline)
The most common three letters to begin a company name:
BIO: 360 companies
GEN: 147
PRO: 129
CEL: 120
MED: 98
NEU: 98
IMM: 76
INT: 76
NOV: 76
PHA: 69
Addition & Attrition
Big purge with our monthly(ish) link check. July's check happened pretty late so we skipped August. This week we added eight companies and removed 68. Summary file available on our downloads page.
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Theranos
During jury selection, media members were chatted up by a friendly man named Hanson who referred to himself as a concerned citizen simply making sure the court proceedings matched what was published as he felt Elizabeth Holmes was unfairly covered by the media for the past half decade. This was not too notable...at least until he showed up to the actual trial sitting with the Holmes family. Turns out he’s Billy Evans, San Diego hotel tycoon and grandfather of Holmes’ new baby.
Why was he giving fake names and making up stories? He's not saying, but when you've got a media circus going, clowns are inevitably gonna show up.
Mammoth Task
Every few years the wooly mammoth resurrection concept gets new life and this time it’s got a $15M investment behind it. (Not bad, but if they did a GoFundMe, they could probably get another $20M without giving up any equity.) Geneticist George Church has been connected with mammoth resurrection for some time and is again involved with this new company which is named “Colossal”.
So will we see mammoths in the near future? No, we will definitely not. They’re the cold fusion of biology – always 30 years away. But it’s still fun to imagine. So fun, BioPharmGuy and his friends have a 10 year-old email thread sharing the latest mammoth news. Back in 2011 it was Japanese and Russian scientists using frozen mammoth marrow. In 2015 there was some reported cloning progress. All the while, multiple outfits have talked about making a Jurassic Park style reserve for these mammoths.
This is all well and good, but could they have picked a worse animal to try to bring back? Two year gestation time plus another 16 years before they become fertile is not a recipe for success - 18 years between generations is unacceptable. Mice go from conception to fertility in 12 weeks, so maybe aim a little lower, scientists!
AntiCancer
With such a clever company name, you probably won’t be surprised as you peruse their sad website. It has a real Geocities vibe. Lot of links, lot of colors, just a lot going on. But the real excitement begins way down at the “ALERT to Scientists, Doctors and Cancer Patients”. AntiCancer feels they were wronged and had some IP stolen. And if you would like to know the exact details, well they don’t address those, but they do have a beautifully rambling, single paragraph filled with a wide array of indirect allegations.
The company tries to appropriate the term “The Big Lie” to apply to some company they were wronged by, and later they have some choice words for a lawyer, who “has been reprimanded by the California Bar for unethical conduct and is a secret shareholder of the company which he did not declare to the Court, and in his apparent dementia fancies himself another David Boies.” It reads like the ravings of a lunatic, but it’s entertaining at times.
The Name Game
Catabasis Pharmaceuticals out in Boston switched gears and transitioned from an initial product that was a small molecule/Omega-3 combo, to a monoclonal antibody. They decided that was grounds for a rebrand, which is good because Catabasis sucked and ‘Pharmaceuticals’ is verbum non grata in the biotech name game these days. Their new moniker is Astria Therapeutics, which is a definite improvement. No anger rises in our blood upon reading the name - always a good thing.
Only downside is Astraea Therapeutics over in Mountain View, CA. Can’t say we’ve actually heard either of these company names uttered, but they’re probably pronounced similarly.
Cytocom, which went public by acquiring the shell of Cleveland BioLabs in July, decided they had a garbage name (which was true) so they converted to Statera Biopharma. They say Statera comes from the Latin word for balance which “better reflects the company's strategic focus on addressing autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, blood disorders, infectious disease and cancer.”
Ok great, but how exactly does changing your stock ticker to “STAB” fit into this whole balance motif? More importantly, there’s already a company in New Haven, CT named Statera Therapeutics (or at least some grad students playing business and calling it a company). LAZY!
5/10: Too lazy to Google the name, Logo text small and weird font; Former name was crap so at least this is better
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Vaccine Mandate
Last week, President Biden signed an executive order to mandate all federal employees and contractors be vaccinated. He also ordered OSHA to require all employers with 100+ employees to require vaccination or weekly testing. While he clearly has authority over the majority of federal employees, the large employer mandate seems legally dubious. Presidents have been signing executive orders for decades that are often mostly about signaling to their base than about actually getting them enacted. Instant legal challenges will determine whether this particular executive order has any teeth.
Vaccine Affecting Evolution?
Not everyone is a science expert, so it’s a fair question to ask whether vaccines are ultimately selecting for stronger and/or more virulent Covid variants. By now most people are familiar with the old doctor’s order to take all your antibiotics, lest you fail to kill the infection, but select for bacteria that can resurge with dangerous, antibiotic-resistant mutations. That antibiotic advice has met with some criticism of late, but for coronavirus it’s a different situation.
The vaccine is not a suboptimal dose of killing power, but more accurately a mutation minimizer/viral minimizer. The fewer times a virus reproduces, the fewer times it has a chance to form a mutation that may end up being helpful. Vaccination reduces the sheer amount of virus that exists out there. But furthermore, at least in early studies, the vaccines have been shown to limit the evolutionary window of coronaviruses meaning there are less types mutations that can possibly occur. (Viruses are small enough for scientists to conclusively see pretty much all the possible mutation sites) So not only are they minimizing reproduction, they also seem to severely limit the mutation space for the viruses.
Mr. Disease Bingo
Speaking of vaccines, one of the two diseases to ever be eradicated completely is smallpox. In that case the virus must have had no evolutionary window at all once vaccines came into force. The last person to become infected naturally was a man known as Ali Maow Maalin of Somalia. He got the disease in 1977 after riding in a car alongside two smallpox patients. He eventually passed away in 2013 after contracting malaria while working on a polio vaccination campaign, thus completing his worldwide scourge bingo card.
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