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BioPharmGuy
After being absolutely forced (forced, I say!) to watch the debut of the Bachelorette on ABC this Tuesday, I saw one of the gentleman suitors from San Diego was tagged as being a “Biotech CEO”. That probably sounds impressive to the average ABC viewer, but with my finger on the industry's bs pulse, I knew better - this required immediate phone-based research.
His name is Jamie Skaar and he is the CEO of two companies called SanctuAire and Sol Solutions. Neither are listed in the BioPharmGuy directory, because, you guessed it, they’re not biotech companies at all. SanctuAire creates “medical reports” after sampling air quality in buildings to help optimize air purification while Sol Solutions offers solar heating products to homeowners. Skaar seems to be the only real employee at both companies.
The good news is, according to his Linkedin profile, he has a Bachelors in Cognitive Psychology & Psycholinguistics, which is ideal for success in the air quality monitoring game.
If you’d like to watch him fit in the phrase “at the end of the day” three times in 96 seconds, check out the YouTube video on the SanctuAire homepage.
-BPG
Addition & Attrition
13 companies added, 12 removed.
Best name added: Kovina Therapeutics
Most boring name added: BioNova Pharm
Name we are saddest to see removed: D&A Pharma
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Theseus Pharmaceuticals
This company went public last week with a $160M IPO. That’s pretty blasé these days, but any time we can find an excuse to talk about the 2500 year-old Ship of Theseus thought experiment, we do it. So here we go! If you’re not familiar, it goes like this:
Imagine an old boat is aging and as it does, its boards/planks and underlying parts are slowly swapped out as needed. Eventually every single piece is replaced. Is it still the same boat?
Many people would lean towards yes, realizing that there is more to defining an object than the stuff it's made of. Then you hit 'em with part 2:
What if someone was storing all those swapped out pieces this whole time and had built a new, crappier ship out of them. Which boat is the ‘real’ ship?
In the modern era it gets even weirder now that we know how cell division, replication & death work. Most of the cells in our bodies are not the same ones we were born with. Some cells are in our eyes forever as are many (most) brain cells, but depending on your age, your arm may be entirely different from when you were a kid, down to the bone. So is it still the same arm or do you have a new one?
One More Wish
Genie Lifesciences contacted us this week requesting to be added to our directory. We were pretty sure they were already listed, but we checked and the company we currently had was Gen1E Lifesciences.
It’s gotta be a punch in the gut to go through name/domain selection, logo creation, etc. and then find out someone on the other side of the country was using the same name but with a number slipped in. Do you think they wish they picked a different name? (Oh yeah! Nailed the genie joke!)
At least they’re not in the exact same business – Genie does lab automation while Gen1E does AI Drug Discovery.
Quivive/Keevive
We've talked about how it’s good practice to buy misspelled urls to protect your website visitors from bad actors. But another important detail is that you have to actually redirect the traffic to your main site. Quivive seems to have bought Keevivepharma.com but is hosting a different version of their website there instead of sending people to their real website. Weird.
But while we’re here, know what else is weird? That picture on their main page. The one with a giant oxycodone pill bottle next to an American flag overlooking a graveyard of pill bottles. Stay classy, Quivive.
Browsing through the rest of the page, it seems they’re trying to sell a drug to be given alongside oxycodone to prevent people from dying of an overdose and they're calling this abuse-deterrence.
So…they’re making it even easier for people to take boatloads of opioids and that’s called progress? Right.
By the way, Purdue Pharma originally sold Oxycodone as being non-addictive. It was bulls**t then and it’s still bulls**t that an abuse-deterrent opioid can exist. Addicts will find a way to abuse it.
Esperion (2)
Esperion Therapeutics was acquired by Pfizer back in 2004 for about $1.3B. Pfizer was making a mint on Lipitor at the time and Esperion was working on an anti-cholesterol drug of their own. Lo and behold, post acquisition, Pfizer ‘developed’ the acquired product at a glacial pace before eventually canning it without providing many details. Color us stupefied!
Former Esperion employees had other ideas. They reacquired some of their old products, got the band back together and eventually went public in 2013 with Esperion Therapeutics 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Sadly, things have not gone well and this week they announced they would be laying off 40% of their workforce. They did put a nice Orwellian spin on it with the title of their press release: “Esperion Announces Plan for Transformative Long-Term Growth”.
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The Life Sciences Baltics conference last month showcased three interesting Lithuanian start-ups:
Droplet Genomics - commercializing droplet microfluidics technology-based solutions.
Diagnolita - developing molecular diagnostics including a saliva COVID-19 PCR test.
Definitely a region to keep an eye on!
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The Pudding
If you still needed some data to demonstrate how well the Covid vaccines are performing, check out these charts from the CDC. They have data from 14 states and two major cities showing which vaccines performed best and how vaccinated vs. unvaccinated plays out amongst each age group. Click around and check them out.
One thing's clear - Moderna is protecting against death the best and J&J is the ‘worst’, but only because someone has to be. Even with Delta, Moderna is cutting death rates by 89% while J&J is cutting them by 77%.
Another cool data set is hospitalizations vs. vaccine status. It shows that in mid-August, vaccinated people had about a 1-in-20,000 chance of being hospitalized due to Covid while the unvaccinated had more like a 1-in-1,000 chance. The lesson there is that, if it hasn't already, Delta is coming for you, and you don't want to be unvaccinated when it happens.
Finally Jason Lewis (@JasonMLewis3) created this cool visualization of vaccination rate vs Covid cases with a neat tweak – he changed each dot color to reflect the latitude of each state to allow you to see how region correlates with everything.
‘Clean’ Drugs
Genexa is a company calling itself the first “clean medicine” company. What they mean by clean is they don’t use high fructose corn syrup, stabilizers, or often even drugs, but rather organic agave syrup, water and a bunch of stuff you’ve never heard of.
Organic Aconitum napellus, Organic Allium cepa, Organic Bryonia; Organic Chamomilla; Organic Echinacea angustifolia; Organic Euphrasia officinalis; Organic Gelsemium sempervirens; Organic Ipecacuanha; Organic Pulsatilla; Organic Sambucus nigra
Oh yeah, definitely sounds like stuff that is very well studied and could have no ill-effects at all! Check out the Wikipedia for that first ingredient - i t’s a highly-toxic flowering plant that is “extremely poisonous in both ingestion and body contact”. Sure, but it’s natural so it's cleeeeeeeean!!!
Some of the other ingredients include onions, gourds, chamomile & another poisonous plant.
Guess the good news is it’s homeopathic crap diluted over and over until nothing is left anyways, so you’re not actually ingesting much from this list of poisons and foods.
It’s a funny thing – ibuprofen, acetaminophen and other common OTC-added ingredients have been in general use for a very long and do have some side effects, but overall they are pretty safe for occasional use. We have a tremendous body of evidence showing this. For a company to ditch those proven ingredients for less studied ingredients in the name of “cleanliness” is really just a way to prey on peoples' fears.
Blue Crab
Scientists in Maryland have sequenced the tastiest genome yet – the Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab. The article about this study suggests all sorts of fantastical ways this genetic information could be used. Futuristic genomic applications like these pretty much never come to fruition, but if it makes everyone feel better, sure, hypothesize about improving reproduction rates or whatever.
We can only hope scientists will move on to the next logical target and sequence the Old Bay genome to understand why it tastes so bad alone, yet so amazing atop blue crabs. That would be a true scientific achievement.
Party Like It's 199999 (BCE)
An extensive analysis of DNA found in a Siberian cave has yielded Human, Neanderthal & Denisovan DNA. Research suggests they may have all been there at the same time.
Talking to people at a party when you all speak the same language can be uncomfortable. Talking to different subspecies must be next level awkward. Maybe that's why they all died in that cave.
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