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Iovance
FDA approved its first one-time cell therapy for a solid tumor. It showed a 31% response rate in advanced melanoma with 42% of responses lasting over two years.
Cell therapies have been all the rage for biotech companies the past decade and they show no sign of slowing down.
Plant-Inspired, Man
Numerous medicines have been derived from plants. That's true of many of the more familiar drugs such as aspirin and heroin.
Thus, companies continue to do research on potential treatments obtained from the plant kingdom. MGC Pharmaceuticals is one of those and they sure do trumpet their focus on “plant-inspired medicine”.
Then you dig a little deeper and find out it’s one particular plant. And you probably know which one, duuuuuuude.
We Got Bibs
Who doesn’t want to work at a company where you’re expected to go out to dinner once a month with the colleagues? 170 hours a month is simply not enough.
But wouldn’t it be even sweeter if, after the meetup, your boss posted a pic of the group all wearing bibs on the company website for the entire world to see? What glory.
Does the photographer regret the creepy “one-eyed selfie”?
Does Belgium have the narrowest dining tables in the world?
So many questions.
Results Are In
In a vote tally that would make the most shameless democratic dictator blush, a shareholder proposal to oust and replace the board at YS Biopharma failed by a margin of 97,272,542 to ZERO.
Suck on that, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov and your lame 97.69% vote total in the 2017 Turkmenistan Presidential election.
After the vote totals, the press release got even weirder, talking about a restraining order against a shadow board who lost this vote, intended to prevent them from masquerading as the legitimate board of the company.
Wild stuff.
Not Your Typical Biopharma
Canopus Biopharma, a public company out of Las Vegas, seems to have pivoted and is now doing business as “Blue Heaven Coffee”.
So, of course their product is…digital advertising technology?
What is even happening. How hard is it to rename a company??
Firefly Bio
New company out of South San Francisco working on antibody-drug conjugates.
They have a good color scheme with unique options that mesh well together. More importantly, they have imagery that uses the antibody structure and turns it into a firefly.
That’s how you appease BioPharmGuy. Nice work. 8/10
Frostbite
FDA approved the first medicine for severe frostbite. Add us to the tally of folks who never would have thought this malady could have a drug-based solution.
The small clinical study showed 0/16 patients on this drug alone had amputation indicators after a week, whereas the patient population who received only other, unapproved treatments had 60% amputation indicators.
Some solid findings.
Trilobite
A Chinese company has launched a product called the Trilobite-100 Sequencer.
Why anyone would need to sequence a single trilobite, let alone 100 simultaneously is beyond us.
Big Paleontology must have more cash than we realized.
Watch Out, Drugs
In case you doubted this CEO's qualifications as a drug hunter, check out his baseball cap and be proven wrong, you hater.
Hope his drug hunt is more successful than that whole war on drugs, though.
Otherwise, drugs are about to go 2-for-2, like the US in World Wars.
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