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!
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