BioPharmGuy News

February 9, 2023

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If Thursday ever comes and you don’t see this newsletter, you can always check LinkedIn. I post it there under both the BioPharmGuy profile and my personal profile. If you would like to do us a solid and share it on that platform, please feel free to follow and/or connect.

Speaking of Linkedin, earlier this week I saw a guy with the job title “CEO & Vice President”, which was a new one for me. Guess he's taking the idea of being your own boss in a strange direction.

I also found a person who had swapped their first and last names, thus rendering themselves totally unfindable. Obviously, Linkedin cannot possibly search for them anymore. They’ve cracked the code!

-BPG

January Funding Summary

If not in terms of employment, when it comes to funding, it's been a happy new year so far.

In January we tracked a strong $2.1B in funding at 58 private companies. Public markets are still locked tight - only one IPO for $7M last month, though there seemed to be an anecdotal uptick in companies announcing future IPO plans.

Biggest round was $138M for Amolyt Pharma courtesy of basically all the big biotech VCs.

In our monthly file we've added a new data column: Investors. We've been tracking that for a while and decided to finally include it here.

Check that out along with a full summary of this month's funding over on our downloads page.

Companies Added & Removed

Busy week with 28 companies added and 39 removed.

Last month we noted a larger number of websites had gone dark than in a usual month. It seems to have gone back to normal for February, so January's jump likely had to do with there being a chunk of companies who prepaid their webhosting on a calendar basis and bit the dust in the interim.

Best New Name:

Piezo Therapeutics

Worst New Name:

Via Scientific

You Will be Missed:

Aerie Pharmaceuticals

You Won't be Missed:

Nu-Med Plus

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

Industry

Greenwash Alert

Thermo Fisher is the latest biotech industry colossus to claim to be green. They say they will be using 100% renewable electricity starting in 2026.

Sounds nice but given their 80,000 employees are spread across numerous facilities all over the US, this is more or less impossible.

So what's really going on?

They're paying two companies in Texas to harvest solar and wind energy in equal amounts to the energy Thermo consumes everywhere.

A cynic may think this is simply increasing clean energy available without reducing dirty energy produced, and that cynic would be 100% correct.

Not only that, more energy available means lower prices means more consumption...it's a whole thing often referred to as economics.

It really would be nice to believe we could pay someone in Texas to make all our problems go away, but unfortunately this plan of theirs is nothing but bulls**t.

Ys Not

This company rebranded from Yisheng Bio to YS Biopharma, which is fine. But you may notice the website is ysbiopharm.com, presumably because the version ending in 'biopharma' is taken.

Which begs the question - if that was the case, why didn't they call the company YS Biopharm? And anyways, biopharma has one too many syllables. We at BioPharmGuy have been saving people jaw movements for almost 15 years now.

Leveraging Alert

You don’t have to look hard to find a company whose self-description tells you absolutely nothing. Some achieve this more succinctly than others. This is not one of the succinct ones:

“Seragon Pharmaceuticals was founded by dedicated scientists, leveraging their experience in biomedical research for the betterment of human health. We devote ourselves to advancing discoveries on behalf of the future of medicine and scientific innovation. The Seragon brand and products reflect years of expertise in clinical, biomedical, and research disciplines that shape our company goals.”

As you scroll down the page, the drivel just keeps going. They do invent a new word, though: ‘biotechnologicall’, so not a total waste.

Really this whole website looks to be AI-created junk, which would track since, somewhere, they say they do AI Vaccine Design.

Fill That Cart

It's not every day a biotech startup working on therapeutics throws a shopping cart on the top of their website, but here’s one for ya.

Simply add a month's worth of treatment to your cart and pay the $85,000 with Apple Pay, PayPal or any major credit card.

Cleanroom Cleaning

Is your cleanroom dirty? If so, you done messed up. But that's ok because cleanroom cleaners exist.

Just be warned, if they mess up, you're gonna have to find a cleanroom cleaner cleaner, which may be tougher to locate.

Iaso Therapeutics

Iaso got some seed funding, which surprised us since we thought they’d been around for a while. Then we realized we were thinking of IASO Biotherapeutics, which is a totally different company.

What a brilliant job naming this new company. 1/10

Health & Science

Covid: The Final Frontier

Chinese government estimates indicate roughly 80% of Chinese people were infected with Covid from November to January. Because of that, officials believe the crush of lunar new year travel is unlikely to lead to any big jump in illness and death.

The reported death figures from the Chinese government are finally going up, but are still vast undercounts. The official number says 60,000 died from Dec 8 to Jan 12, but the real number is many times higher. Some estimates for November - January are as high as a million.

Given the government's own statement that 80% of people were infected, that would mean 1.1 billion infections. And the head of China's CDC stated the death rate was on the order of 1 in 1000. Considering China's ban on the most effective mRNA vaccines from US/Europe, that's probably a pretty good fatality rate estimate.

So that means a million people likely died of the pandemic in China over the past couple months. Yet in the west we heard almost nothing about it.

They certainly run a tight (dictator)ship over there.

Electrolysis

In what could be a significant achievement, researchers at the University of Adelaide announced they had successfully split untreated seawater into oxygen and hydrogen at close to 100% efficiency.

Typically, hydrolysis requires fresh, deionized water, which takes energy to produce (and is drinkable, so people may not be keen on using potable water source to make hydrogen). For water to be a future energy source, ocean water must be used. Eliminating a taxing purification step really opens its potential.

Let the Ideas Flow

Sometimes engineers come up with unexpected answers to their problems. But rarely is that answer sitting on a shelf at Walgreens.

For a certain model of aircraft, it was discovered at some point that a tampon was able to perfectly substitute for a tubular air filter. Thus, a tampon, is used in the Piper Navajo airplane.

And if you don't believe us, do you believe Boeing?

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