April 6, 2023

BioPharmGuyNews.png

Purchase Data

Promoted Listings

Protect your priceless research and reputation today

Trusted by private and public labs, Sonicu delivers affordable and reliable temperature (ULT/cryo), humidity, air pressure & CO2 monitoring that protects virtually any environment. And automates your compliance. 


Case studies from two labs: Ohio University Innovation Center & MiraVista Diagnostics


Asset Protection & Compliance Automation from the Leader in Laboratory Monitoring

BioPharmGuy

Our newsletter open rate plummeted two weeks ago from 36% to about 25%. Got us worried. Thankfully it jumped back to normal for the big spring break roast.


If your spam filter snagged the one from two weeks ago, here’s the link


Roast Egg

On the topic of recent newsletters - let's talk about last week’s spring break roast, shall we?


That one was written and scheduled almost a week in advance on March 23rd due to vacation plans. So how could we possibly have known one of the roast targets was going to die in the interim?? 


News of the death of the self-proclaimed father of cannabis research trickled into the English language media about March 27th and we proceeded to roast him March 30th. Not a great look!


But also, unintentional. Thankfully we weren’t mean and only made a Snoop Dogg joke.


As for his contribution to the field, the guy did discover THC, so held a reasonable claim to actually being the father of cannabis research. You might even say he was the puff daddy.


-BPG



Companies Added & Removed

Since last time, 30 companies added, six removed.


Best New Name:

BioBam


Worst New Names:

JelloX Biotech & BJ Bioscience


You Will be Missed:

Bioasis Technologies


Excel file of added/removed companies available on our downloads page.

Industry

Shorts Weather

Going to town on Ginkgo Bioworks ("a colossal scam") and Twist Bioscience ("A Ponzi-like scheme") wasn’t enough for Scorpion Capital, a group of short-sellers. They laid into Harmony Biosciences last week and they did not hold back one bit - the report started with this 74-word title, for god's sake! 


In total it’s 366 pages long which seems comically absurd. We sure as hell ain’t readin' it but feel free.


Frankly, it looks like it was written by email spammers, not professional investors. Lot of red fonts, yellow highlighting, tremendous amount of underlining going on there too. Looks like something you would expect a 10th grader to produce. Hard pass.


But Scorpion's record on this stuff is unimpeachable to date.


Johnson & Johnson

After failing in its legal maneuver to hive off its liabilities for talc powder wrongdoing into a separate company that could then go bankrupt and owe nothing, J&J is going to face the music on 38,000-odd talc related lawsuits thanks to cooler heads prevailing in the court system. 


The fact that this strategy has worked in the past for other companies makes you question the entire US legal system. If a company can somehow wave their hands and say “presto, anything we did that was bad is now owned by this newly created company!” then there is effectively no liability for anything ever. That’s some third world corruption.


Sorry, Wrong Number

35 Bio is a new company that just dropped.


How many ways can you reasonably write the number 35? We say three - Thirty Five, 35 or the edgy thirty5.


We do not accept this monstrosity: 30five. Because (a) this isn't a late 90s boy band and (b) that would be a version of 305, not 35.


Don’t tell the company who picked their name before checking if a reasonable website url was available. Yuck.


Why the Modesty?

Genscript isn’t pulling any punches – first sentence of their press release they declare they are the world’s leading biotech company. Big words for a company that brought in less than a billion in revenue last year.


They might be the top biotech company after the top 150, though. So that's something.


Outsourcing R&D

Every year, the share of biopharm R&D happening at smaller companies increases. It was up 4% again last year. People are asking “what’s going on with big pharma??” as if there is a problem.


We’ll tell you what’s going on – big pharma is perfectly content letting a hundred small companies and their investors figure out what works and what doesn’t. Then they pay big bucks to take over midway. Pretty logical, actually. And small companies are cooler to work at anyways, so let’s keep it up!


BPG Directory Judgement

Seinfeld fans may remember the episode where eating mangoes bumps up George’s libido. This company went all in with that theme - they're calling themselves Mangoceuticals and their product is a mango flavored ED treatment.


You know you have a company of true professionals when they tout their Barstool Sports connection on the homepage. Good grief.


Website is not safe for anyone over the age of 25 due to puerile humor, which is a genius marketing ploy for a product whose users are generally over the age of 40.


BPG Verdict: Not Listed.


Fig Leaf

MGC Pharma mentions on their homepage that they 'advocate for diversity, with more than 60% women'.


Bragging about a 3:2 female-to-male ratio seems like something the hosts of a college frat party might do. Is having a gender imbalance a brag-worthy achievement in a professional setting?


Perhaps more pertinently, this company that's bragging about being 60% female just so happens to have a management team that is 75% male, a board that is 100% male and a scientific advisory group that is 80% male. Excluding overlaps between those three groups, in aggregate there are two women and thirteen men in charge.


What brave warriors for social change!

Health & Science

Four Legs Good

Despite over a billion data points, China proved unwilling to approve an mRNA Covid vaccine for years. Unwilling, that is, until a Chinese company successfully copied the other mRNA vaccines.


After this occurrence, they are magically now safe so China’s FDA approved the local one.


Politically, this was probably done to ensure a domestic mRNA industry could get going in China. But how many thousands of people died because of the government's refusal to approve the Moderna or BioNTech vaccines?


Hospitals: No Babies

Some interesting news out of Idaho. Not one, but two hospitals have declared they will stop delivering babies. The first said it was because OB's are fleeing the state in the wake of the draconian restrictions being imposed on their ability to freely practice, while the second said it was because of more general staffing issues and lack of demand.


Quite the bummer for the families who will now have to choose between driving an hour to deliver their babies or doing so at home, away from medical facilities they may wish to be near in case of any problems.


Sadly, we will likely see more of this as times goes on. Some states are enacting extremely strict laws relating to pregnant women and are written in ways that leave doctors liable for saving patients' lives if it means an unborn (and unviable) fetus perishes in the process.


Two of the groups most likely to be pro-choice are highly educated people and women. Female doctors are one of the most pro-choice demographics you could dream up and 85% of obstetricians are now women.


Mid-career doctors may be settled down with families and unwilling to move in the near term, but decades down the line, who will be delivering babies in all these virulently anti-abortion states that allow no exemption for saving mothers' lives?


Mammoth Meatball

Biotech companies have been dabbling with the outlandish idea of resurrecting the wooly mammoth for almost 15 years now. But people sometimes wonder, what would they even do with a mammoth if it worked? It has no ecosystem in which to live. So basically, zoos or dinner plates are the only options.


Last week a company claimed to have achieved the latter by creating a mammoth meatball. Sort of. Except not at all.


What they really achieved was a successful publicity stunt. Because all they did was stick one incomplete mammoth gene into a sheep cell. Even this incomplete gene had to be filled in with elephant DNA. 


Talk about a nothingburger.

Promote Your Listing at BioPharmGuy

Check your website's analytics - BioPharmGuy is likely your top referrer.


Bump up those referrals even more with a Premium Listing. Learn more - Promoted Listings.

Subscribe!

If you're reading this and not a subscriber, please join our mailing list.

BioPharmGuy is a registered trademark of Wilsonian LLC, Content © 2023 Wilsonian LLC