Parallel operation to shorten your time-to-market: The Eppendorf DASbox is a 4-fold unit, ideal for parallel processing of up to 24 bioreactors. It supports process development following the Quality by Design (QbD) approach by providing comprehensive information management, integration of third-party analyzers, and Design of Experiments (DoE) tools as well as remote access.
Visit their website for more information.
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BioPharmGuy
BioPharmGuy about to ramble here. The news of the week was Pfizer/BioNtech's Covid vaccine worked at preventing Covid symptoms in ~90% of patients. That's astonishing. Granted, this is different than preventing Covid transmission, which it may do just no info yet, but it's still a very, very big deal. 90% is pretty much best case. Pfizer's CEO was quick to point out he didn't say 90%, he said "more than 90%".
What not many people have ignored during the pandemic is we don't have vaccines to common colds, HIV, and a panoply of other pathogens on which many millions of dollars have been spent. Really, who was to say Covid-19 was going to be any different? Being a respiratory disease certainly made it more plausible, but no one could have been sure. With this news that vaccination is technically feasible, the life we now live seems a bit easier to handle - this pandemic will end.
Humanity had a collective problem and it looks like biotechnology is going to play a big part in solving it. A proud day for all in this industry.
Addition & Attrition
21 companies added, five removed. Athos Therapeutics, Inipharm & Luminary Therapeutics among the more recent startups in this bunch. Summary file on our downloads pizz-age.
October Funding
This month we tracked $3.1B in funding for private biotech companies plus $2.5B worth of IPOs. CEOs are drinking coffee out of golden chalices and there's no sign of a slowdown in the bling train. Summary file on our downloads page.
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Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine
As we already mentioned, news came out Monday that this vaccine looks to be 90% effective in preventing symptomatic Covid. Much better than expected. Trial still needs to follow participants for a bit to screen for negative side effects, but this is looking like the early Christmas present we all needed.
Pfizer says they may have 25 million courses available by year's end and another 650 million throughout 2021. These have been allocated to various governments around the world, so this alone cannot solve the problem, but it's a hell of a start.
Kintaro Biosciences
This company is a joint venture from Mount Sinai Health System and RenalytixAI. But if you have questions and would like to talk to them, they tell you to call Bio-Techne. What a confusing arrangement they've got goin' on here.
CARSgen
News came out they just received $186M in Series C funding. We already had a $60M Series C listed in our database from 2018. The $186M was all new. But that prior $60M C round turns out to actually have been a "pre-C" round. You know, once upon a time pre-C was known as 'B', but now we apparently have half letters, because they already had an actual B round.
But hey, we know what round they're really on: pre-E.
Clinuvel
Nothing says modern quite like a website where a circle and a dot follow your mouse pointer around the page. Not annoying. Not annoying at all. No we don't want to punch our computer screen, why would you say that? It's just a circle following the pointer everywhere for no reason. Makes total sense. Not mad. Not mad...
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Slovakia
Offered free Covid test to all citizens over the age of 10 in a single weekend. About 2/3 of the country participated and just over 1% were positive.
USA
Unlike cutting-edge nations such as Slovakia, North & South Dakota have done pretty much nothing from the top down to address the pandemic. And they are now amongst the worst areas in the world for infection/death rates.
Just how bad is it in North Dakota? Hospitals are at 100% capacity and they're allowing Covid positive, asymptomatic nurses to come to work. Still no mask mandate, by the way.
Currently the worst states in America for Covid cases per capita are North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Utah, Mississippi, Idaho. Of those only Wisconsin & Utah have statewide mask mandates. Gee, it's almost as if masks prevent the spread of Covid.
Alzheimer's Infection?
With the exceptional number of Alzheimer's drug failures, it's become pretty clear that the amyloid hypothesis is toast. Yet the vast quantity of money dedicated to amyloid research has drastically slowed scientists' and doctors' willingness to accept reality.
The good news is some are moving on and recognizing the amyloid plaques on the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers are almost certainly a symptom, not the cause of the disease. Latest research is looking at whether an infectious disease is ultimately spurring Alzheimer's.
Fresh ideas are sadly becoming rarer as more and more researchers rely on federal funding and the federal agencies in turn become more likely to award money to researchers following accepted dogma. We need more research with dramatic upside, not more of the same.
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