BioPharmGuy News

May 19, 2022

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BioPharmGuy

Hit the magic 14,000 subscriber threshold this week. Thanks for putting us over the top, hotpuppychick42069! We will be celebrating by eating five Mexican pizzas at Taco Bell.

Podcast

I was a guest on Raman Sehgal’s Molecule to Market podcast this week. Raman is the founder of Ra Marketing, a life science marketing firm with whom we’ve worked quite a bit through the years. Not being a huge podcast guy, it took Raman a while to finally wear me down with his interview requests, but wear down I did.

So for the second consecutive week, you have the opportunity to hear me speak - in this case I ramble on about BioPharmGuy, entrepreneurship and other random stuff. Tried to make it a little less boring than most podcasts out there, hopefully with at least a little success. It was definitely better than the first podcast I did a while back, which was the definition of boring.

Give it a listen on your preferred platform: Spotify, Apple, Download.

If you’re looking to outsource any marketing projects, take a look at what Ra offers – they have clients big and small around the globe.

Monthly Funding

Halfway through May and we finally have the April numbers tallied. $2.8B in private rounds at 49 companies plus three IPOs for $245M. The money trees seem to be bearing less fruit, which was expected. Check out our summary file on the downloads page.

Added & Removed

33 companies added, seven removed.

Best New Name:

Limaca Medical

Worst New Name:

Caeregen Therapeutics

Cliffhanger:

BioDynami

You Will be Missed:

OsteoGeneX

Summary file available on the downloads page.

Industry

And Don’t Come Back!

SeaGen (aka Seattle Genetics) was involved in a salacious piece of biotech news recently. Their CEO, Clay Siegall, was arrested on April 23 for 4th degree domestic violence. Details of the supposed events are Hollywood levels of wild.

CliffsNotes version of the alleged events: He and his wife went out with three other couples, everyone came back to the Siegalls' mansion. Two couples left, Siegall's wife got in bed with the remaining couple, Siegall pulled her from said bed, pushed her to the floor and dragged her around.

Upon calling the police, the wife backtracked almost immediately and requested that police not come, though they did anyways as one of her bedfellows also phoned them on their (surely sober) drive home. In the end she opened up to police about having safe spaces in the mansion where she could hide and how on the night before their wedding, security was called because of a loud fight.

Siegall did not inform SeaGen of his eventful weekend and proceeded to lead an investor call April 28, the same day on which he filed for divorce (again - Feb 2021 was the couple's first divorce filing).

A restraining order was implemented May 11, (another repeat - his wife also had a protection order back in 2021) and ultimately Siegall resigned this week.

The Aristocrats!

Kraken Released

Martin Shkreli is free. Kinda. He's been sent to some sort of halfway house. Should be out of federal hands by September at which point we will be waiting patiently for the next season of the Shkreli Show. Hopefully he gets up to some fun antics before he inevitably violates probation/parole.

Deplete 'em and Treat 'em

British American Tobacco (BAT) claims to have founded a new biotech company in January 2022 which they call KBio. Only problem is the company has existed since 2006 and was formerly owned by Reynolds American. BAT acquired Reynolds in 2017 creating a cigarette juggernaut, but sure, they 'founded' this biotech company a couple months ago. Whatever.

Tobacco plants have been used in biotech for a while, so while it’s not an entirely zany mixing of businesses, it’s always an interesting juxtaposition for a tobacco company to get into healthcare. Kind of like if a gunmaker started making ultrasounds. Feels weird.

Character Bio

Formerly known as Clover Therapeutics, this company probably wanted to distance themselves from the unrelated company known as Clover Biopharmaceuticals. Fair enough. They picked a new name and landed on Character Bio. Wow, great idea, because that’s not already a common writing term or anything. How the hell is anyone gonna find this company on Google?

Eye Mite, Die

Tarsus Pharmaceuticals released some good data for their eye mite treatment. Join the club if you’ve never heard of eye mites. Apparently 25 million Americans are affected by eyelid mites every year. What in the world...

Latch Bio

Ok, last week we went a little hard at this company for their silly team page. It’s supposed to be in good fun here and we wanted to make sure everyone realizes that in spite of questionable website decisions, we have no ill will for the companies we razz.

LatchBio is very new in the Bay Area and they’re working on an in-browser solution for integrating various lab data streams. They started operating in 2021 and appear to be about 14 employees strong. They’re doing some hiring – we see a Business Development position on there. Sunglasses aside, maybe it actually is a fun place to work. One way to find out…

BioMark Diagnostics

We don’t know anything about this company, but nothing quite says ‘legitimate biotech’ like putting a picture of an airbrushed model atop your homepage. Other classic marks of legitimacy are the appearance of the term "leveraging" plus some links to YouTube videos.

This company is publicly traded, because of course it is. But what's more, the company itself has published a top-10 list of why their stock is a “Buy and Long-term Hold”. That is a really, really weird thing to see a company publish. We especially enjoyed #6, which basically says 'The Canadian government keeps giving us money'.

Again, we know nothing about this company, but from where we're standing, the talking points on that top 10 list have a lot of overlap with the Theranos pitch deck.

Nanology

It's not that hard to set up a company email through G Suite or something similar. But if you're going to settle on using free web-based email services, is it too hard to have everyone at the company use the same provider? This company couldn't decide between Gmail and Comcast so went halfsies.

Alert the Press!

Titan Medical announced in a press release that they bought some stuff. Seriously. This is what happens when you hire more marketing people than you need. Dive in and hear the tale of how Titan signed a purchase order.

They Get a Vote?

MDMA has elected Leslie Trigg as their new chair. Congrats to Leslie and condolences to the second place finisher: a Sharper Image massage recliner.

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Health & Science

Infant Formula Shortage

We are in the midst of an infant formula shortage and if you have a young child who eats the stuff, that is a very daunting prospect. (No, not everyone can just decide to breastfeed, especially months after ceasing production. Stop it already!)

Remember what we all did when we found some toilet paper? Now imagine instead of something to clean your nether regions, it was the only thing your baby could eat. Almost any market fails when people begin to stockpile, and it’s hard to think of a market that would do so to a higher degree than infant formula.

What’s the answer? That’s hard to say. FDA and formula companies have very high production standards for anything baby-related, which is why one of the major producers is currently shut down (and which is a big part of thisshortage).

When BioPharmGuy was at the FDA, investigators would pitch-in on device recalls or whatever if we were free, but the mythology of what happens during any baby-related recall was enough to strike terror into us. Anything baby related is an all-hands on deck, five-alarm fire at the FDA.

So it’s going to be an extremely difficult balancing act ramping up formula production while maintaining high quality standards. Just yesterday, President Biden, using the Defense Production Act, directed formula ingredient manufacturers to prioritize sending their ingredients to formula makers. He also permitted the DoD's commercial airplanes to import formula. While slightly better than nothing, those directives aren't going to make any real difference.

Covid Vaccines

Where we at with vaccines? Still safe, still effective, though a far cry from the 95% of the olden days. With Omicron they're more like 70% effective against severe illness, 40% effective against infection.

FDA just approved boosters for children age 5-11. Moderna has submitted the EUA for children age 6 mos to 5 yrs. They based their submission on clinical data obtained during Omicron showing ~40% efficacy. It's looking like it may be mid-June before this age group could receive their initial shots.

Finally, in March, second boosters for adults over age 50 were approved, but not for younger cohorts. There's not much info pointing to when these second boosters will be available to the young'ns in the 18-49 demographic.

Alexa, I Ate a Cookie

Having diabetes is annoying to deal with, and since many millions of people have it, numerous digital health companies are focusing on that ailment with their initial products. They have all manner of apps and sensors. The latest is a company offering Alexa integration for those times it’s just too difficult to touch your phone.

You know, at some point laziness can’t be beaten. We already have a computer in our pocket which we merely have to place our thumb on to unlock, which can have important apps sitting at the bottom of the screen permanently. Touching an icon and entering a number is not a big ask for 95% of diabetic patients (totally made up that percentage, but probably in the ballpark).

Moral: Easy is never easy enough.

Milk You Like a Hurricane

Scorpion spam is kind of a running joke over here. The scorpion business at large comes across as shady, but some of it is indeed more formal. For example, here we have a new contender for worst place on Earth: A 12 acre scorpion reservation in the Dominican Republic. They milk the scorpions every three weeks and even planted grapes to enhance their venom. Sounds like a great setting for a horror movie.

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