Before approval and launch of your drug product, CMC Pharmaceuticals Inc. can help you avoid the valley of death that is drug development. From Big Pharma to emerging start-ups, their scientists have decades of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. CMC Pharma is ideally suited to meet all of your drug development needs including formulation, analytical, stability, drug delivery system design, and cGMP lab services.
Contact them to discuss your program to see how they can help.
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BioPharmGuy
About 2100 people open this email each week, so we would like to wish a happy birthday to the five or six of you whose birthday is today. Get crazy!
Name Changes
Historically it was relatively rare for biotech companies to change their names. They still happened, and some of the older, more well known biotechs out there did rebrand early on (Amgen rolls off the tongue a bit better than Applied Molecular Genetics).
Things have changed in the past few years and rebranding has become much more common. Last year we tracked 67 companies that changed their names. If you're into that sort of thing, a full list is available on our downloads page. Some were good, others...no.
Biggest Improvement - Analytics 4 Life becomes CorVista Health
That original name harkens back to late 90's professional wrestling. It was so out of place, anything would have been better. CorVista is sort of boring, but the improvement was solid.
What were they thinking? - greenovation Biotech becomes Eleva
Can't argue with this company wanting to rebrand, but Eleva sounds like they started a word and didn't finish. It's not a unique groupings of letters. Not recognizable within a text wall. Total dud.
Bad to Bad: DrugCENDr becomes CEND Therapeutics
Guess they really wanted to preserve that all caps "CEND". All caps names are not great, and CEND Therapeutics sound like a plea for help, but man, DrugCENDr was ridiculous.
Addition & Attrition
35 companies added, five removed this week. Check out the summary on our downloads page.
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Sana Biotechnology
And so the biotech bubble reaches its absurdist conclusion - the new biggest biotech IPO ever in US history is a company that hasn't even taken a drug into clinical trials and probably won't for another year if things go to plan. Sana Biotechnology ultimately tallied $675M in their stock market debut, which is a bit more than the $600M Moderna clocked back in Dec 2018. This boom has officially gone bonkers, but just wait 'til everyone gets another $1400 in stimulus funds.
Seer Biotech
This company couldn't foresee how much capital they needed when they did a $150M IPO a whole 70 days ago, so last week they sold a bunch more stock. $251M worth to be precise. Looking forward to their next stonk sale maybe in April. To the moon! (four rocket ship emojis go here)
Crinetics
Interesting pipeline page here. You arrive at the page and all the products are in the R&D stage, but slowly the dots indicating clinical stage migrate to the right as if you're watching time pass. Excitement builds as you wonder if the lead product will make it to phase 3.
If you're on a phone try it vertically, then flip it horizontally - the dots end up in different places. Is the lead product done with Phase 2 or in the middle of Phase 2? Depends how you hold your phone. A publicly-traded company displaying different information for different visitors? Naughty.
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Vaccination Progress
The drop in cases continues to be tremendous. In the dead of winter, when respiratory diseases traditionally run wild, we are seeing caseloads in the US drop by 35% every two weeks. Cases are decreasing everywhere in the US at the state level which we have never seen before. Given the time since the holidays, it's clear these drops are due almost entirely to the vaccines. Please don't pass up your turn. And for the love of all that is holy - keep the mask on. Cases are only dropping because we are still in pandemic suppression mode. If you hop back on Tinder every night, it's gonna be six more months of Covid winter.
Oops
Last week we pointed out the severely redacted EU Covid vaccine agreement with AstraZeneca. Well, someone's about to lose their job, because it seems some (not all) of the black boxes on the document were easily removed. After reading through the newly uncovered info, it's clearly stuff that never should have been redacted in the first place. Some lazy legal clerk probably just told them to redact everything.
Weird Side Effect
Never a good idea to take a chemotherapy drug unless you really, really need it. But if you're a bank robber from 1978, you may be interested to know there is a treatment called capecitabine that has the interesting side effect of causing a temporary loss of fingerprints.
FDALabel
FDA databases are notoriously difficult to handle. We have used them for our work here the past decade and they just don't seem to get better. You can download the entire drug establishment registration database, but it's an absolute beast to work with.
So this is some decent news - FDA has a new database to search drug labels. A "label" includes the packaging plus the paper insert in the product that your pharmacist can theoretically look at before putting the product into the generic amber bottle you take home.
You pretty much never see these labels as a consumer, but with the new FDA database, you can now more easily do full text searches for products, side effects, etc. Alas, it returned no results for losing your fingerprints.
Frankenmeat
The latest in the march of mock meats comes from a company called NovaMeat. Their specialty is 3D printed meat which was recently featured in a vegan business magazine. They've created a block of disgusting looking meat-type thing that is 22500 cubic millimeters large. The pictures and descriptions in the article are just...ugh.
Interestingly their product uses mammalian adipose (fat) cells as well as plant cells. How this is acceptable to vegans is anyone's guess - animal origin is animal origin.
Wood Absurdity Level: Infinity
Last week we had a wooden satellite, this week scientists are leapfrogging that lame idea and going straight to lab-grown wood. Condolences to your next of kin if your head just exploded.
Nature has perfected the production of wood over the course of about 400 MILLION YEARS using only dirt, sun, water & air. If anyone, including MIT scientists think they can do better, they will fail miserably. It's ridiculous they're even talking about this as a solution to a problem. They're even quoted as saying the natural process of making wood is inefficient. Yeah, so inefficient yet they just grow by the trillions without any human intervention.
Bioreactors in labs use a lot of electricity and money to build and run, never mind that the product will certainly be inferior to real wood. It's total scientific hubris - solving a problem that was solved hundreds of millions of years ago. Just crazy. And wood is possibly the most renewable material in existence! If they think lab-grown wood is going to save the Amazon, they're out of their damn minds.
But hey, they think they can grow wood in the shape of a table, and so it should save on glue. Well that makes it all worthwhile! So stupid.
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Biocentriq
Their new facility on the New Jersey Institute of Technology's campus in Newark is up and running and they are looking to fill some openings. Available positions included Aseptic Biopharma Manufacturing Trainer, Business Development Director, Cell Therapy Associate Engineer & Cell Therapy Process Development Engineer. Check out the openings here under Biopharma Division.
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