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EQRx
10 approved drugs in 10 years was Alexis Borisy's outrageous promise when founding EQRx. Actual outcome? Borisy, now the ex-CEO, bought EQRX's carcass through his other company, Revolution Medicines for about $1.07B in stock.
Glad to see this stupid company finally gone. They were going to change the industry! Shut up. Just shut up. Regulated biotech doesn't work that way.
Revolution paid $1.07B in stock for a company that was holding $1B in cash. So ultimately EQRx turned $2B of investors’ money into $1B while making no discernable scientific progress.
Bravo and sayonara.
Solid Brag
Had to do a double take when this company announced the FDA had bought a piece of pharmaceutical processing equipment. Then we remembered, yes, the FDA has labs where they do testing and it does make sense to have some real equipment on hand.
If the FDA believes in your stuff enough to buy it, shoot, go ahead and brag about it.
Redona
Happened upon this company located in the Boston area that has been around since 2016. Started to beat ourselves up about missing it the whole time. Generally, they don’t fly under our radar in Boston for that long.
But then we checked the Massachusetts business registry. Lo and behold, Redona registered the name only in January. They had been previously known as “Twentyeight-Seven Therapeutics”.
Two thumbs up for ditching that clunker of a name, but the question is, why wouldn’t they redirect the old website to the new one? We first made note that the old website disappeared in March. And it never redirected to Redona’s website. Almost sounds as if they were running away from something…
More importantly, we did not miss this company for seven years. It was in our directory the whole time and flagged as having a broken website for the past several months. We were on it!
Biostage Left
Needed a new name. Decided they weren’t into the whole brevity thing. Biostage will now be known as Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology. An amazing 375% increase in characters. Perfect for the micro attention span era.
Pfizer
Some things can't be predicted. A tornado hit Pfizer's NC facility a couple weeks ago. And while it doesn’t sound like many products are solely sourced there, one is: “vitamin K1, which is needed for almost every live birth in a hospital”.
Yikes.
Let’s hope there’s a plentiful supply sitting in the warehouse. Oh, what's that?
The warehouse took all the damage? Wonderful.
CTO
Not a company we will list, but Ilumed has announced the hiring of a new Chief Transformation Officer. That’s a new version of CTO to us, but hopefully this new hire, Optimus Prime, can take the team to the next level.
Biogen
News came out that Biogen is acquiring Reata for a piddling $7.3B. Guess that partially explains the firing of 1000 people last week, though the $1B cost savings from that move only makes a dent in this price tage.
Southern Accent
If you are a company that is located in a country whose alphabet has accent marks and you want to throw one in your brand, it’s understandable.
But if you’re located in Tampa, it’s just plain annoying. Lookin' at you, Verséa Health.
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