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Brave New World
This morning, the UK's drug approval agency approved Casgevy, the world's first CRISPR gene-editing therapy, for patients with sickle-cell disease and beta thalassemia. The big breakthrough on gene-editing vs. more traditional drugs is it often appears to be a cure as opposed to a lifelong treatment.
This particular product, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, is created by taking the patient's own bone marrow, editing the genes in their stem cells, then reinfusing those cells back into the patient. Thus, this product is custom-made for each patient and will be expensive.
But a one-time cost to eliminate a lifetime of pain and medical treatments should be a winning deal.
If you want to learn about CRISPR here's a pretty good rundown.
Roll Semaglutide
The good news keeps rolling in for these weight-loss drugs. Trials have now shown, not only does semaglutide lead to weight-loss, it also reduces the chances that overweight, non-diabetic patients with pre-existing heart disease will have a heart attack.
That's a lot of patient adjectives, but still cool that we now have evidence it's making people healthier. One step closer to insurance providers being unable to omit coverage...
Erroneous Prognostications
On the topic of mega drugs, when biotech analysts predict future drug sales, how accurate are they anyways? Generally it's hard for us to know since much like professional stock-pickers, the analysts don't keep track. How convenient for them.
@andrewpannu fixed that and posted on X-Twitter his retrospective look at analyst Projection vs. Actual biotech product sales for the years 2013-2018.
To little surprise, it turns out analysts are pretty much just guessing - they are almost always wrong, and not in a consistent direction. In fact, every year had a projected $100M+ product that ended up earning $0. And every year also had a product whose sales exceeded analysts' expectations by over 200%.
The best one was the prediction back in 2013 that Keytruda would pull in $1 billion in 2018. Try $7 billion.
Team Roast - Antag Therapeutics
It's nice to see a dose of humility on the management's profile, though you won't find it at Antag. Instead, you will learn how a guy is "The most cited living physiologist between 1996-2006". Homie really cherry-picked his ten best years.
If they stopped at "most cited living physiologist", probably impressive. Or if the years were 2012-2022 since that would mean this person is the top dog now.
Bragging about a modest claim to niche fame that occurred during the Clinton administration is not the flex they think it is.
Vertos Medical
Patents are pretty cool. They promote R&D and incentivize the discovery and creation of useful new technologies. Everyone knows you can get them on a physical device or a drug, but did you know you can get them on a procedure? This company effectively sells a license to a patented surgery.
Sure, they also sell some run-of-the-mill tools that are technically patented along with it, but ultimately the value is the procedure. Here's a lawyer's explanation of it all.
Patenting an action is interesting, but also weird when you think about it.
That Company Over There
We can understand that non-native English speakers may not be fully down with American slang, and perhaps as a result they may make dubious choices when naming their company. But that doesn't mean it isn't funny when it happens.
Introducing: THOT, a new scientific data management company.
Unfortunately, language can't explain this ridiculous "data fairy" video they thought was funny. (it's not)
Team Roast – Seconds
Breaking new ground here. Two consecutive weeks for the same company. You may recall last week we featured Centivax and their "smash the mutants" catchphrase. We duly made a ninja turtle joke, but turned out we should have made a snake joke.
This company may be the first biotech to have a Director of Herpetology. And boy, is he bringing the goods. First - he is described as an "autodidact herpetologist", which is a fancy way of saying 'self-taught reptile guy'. But then it starts to get wild. Real wild.
The man says he has been bitten over 200 times by venomous snakes. And yet he lives and breathes. How? Probably from watching the Princess Bride too many times. He claims to have gone full Westley and self-administered 700 escalating doses of snake venoms thus bestowing immunity upon himself.
Always an interesting play to base your company around the work of a guy who injected himself with 700 doses of snake venom and threw in another 200 doses the natural way.
What kind of snake expert is getting bitten TWO HUNDRED TIMES anyways? Good lord. Maybe he should have gotten a little formal training?
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