Weekly discussion of biotech news w/ @daphnezohar @bradloncar @timopler @LifeSciVC, @cngarabedian, top analysts & other biotech insiders
Joined January 2021
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Jun 12
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An open letter to @TheLancet from an Iranian-Jewish cardiologist.
Today, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals published a campaign to suspend the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association — the body founded after WWII to ensure physicians would never again be weaponized by political ideology.
I'm a cardiologist. I'm an Iranian Jew who grew up under a regime where medicine was subjugated to the state.
What The Lancet just did is a disgrace to my profession.
Here's what they published — and what they deliberately left out.
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The growing opposition to CA's proposed "billionaire tax" offers an important lesson for other states. Not all proposals to raise revenue would bring the state more cash, and the long-term economic consequences may outweigh short-term fiscal gains.
f.mtr.cool/vngtpjsoxa
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Brian, for the love of god, you cannot take a health database, click 'sort' and think that the top 5 drugs patients who survive longer happen to be taking are causal to the benefit those patients received. 500k is actually not a large cohort for a database, needs alpha correction, was very unlikely to be prespecified, etc. that's why no one is impressed with these studies and they're published in trash journals.
this study showed a slight increase in CV events with PDEs vs placebo
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1452…
the mechanistic rationale is not there and your explanation is terrible. ALL PDEs metabolize cAMP/cGMP, thats why they are phosphodiesterases. are you suggesting we should inhibit all PDEs?!
by the same logic we should all be taking ERAs too. why not ARBs and ACEs? screw it i'll take inhaled treprostinil too. might extend my life. then i'll run SQL queries on health databases until i see a 'signal', bonferroni may roll in his grave but i will be vasodilated.
The strongest evidence for tadalafil as a longevity candidate is large scale observational. In a propensity matched cohort of 509,788 men with erectile dysfunction, tadalafil over 3 years was associated with 34% lower all cause mortality, 32% lower dementia, 27% lower MI, and 34% lower stroke.
Supporting cohorts show the same direction, including a dose dependent gradient: in higher risk men the top PDE5 inhibitor exposure quartile reached a mortality risk reduction of 49%.
For a drug discussed as “longevity medicine,” that is close to the ceiling of current human evidence. No drug, tadalafil included, has a completed RCT with lifespan or healthspan as the primary endpoint, so observational signal on hard endpoints is the best the field has, and tadalafil’s is unusually large and consistent.
The mechanism is also coherent. PDE5 inhibition raises cGMP, improves endothelial function and NO signaling, and the cardiovascular event data line up with that pathway. That supports causal plausibility for the vascular benefit, though it does not establish a lifespan effect.
Disease specific and healthy user bias cannot be ruled out.
The disease specific part: ED is itself a sign of vascular disease or dysfunction, which tadalafil’s mechanism can help directly.
The healthy user part: wanting to maintain a healthy sex life in older age is a marker of relatively good health.
None of this is a recommendation to take tadalafil on your own. It should follow from your individual health and biomarker profile, and only under specialized physician advice and oversight.
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Jun 12
Elon Musk created 4,400 millionaires today alone.
The only millionaire Elizabeth Warren has created is herself.
#txlege
Jun 12
Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire.
The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk's level of wealth.
We need a wealth tax.
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Jun 12
On today’s #BiotechHangout, @soowannaway (Graig Suvannavejh), @EricSchmidt151, @MatteisPaul & @FT’s @mroliverbarnes will cover the markets: Parabilis’ ($PBLS) record $670M IPO, Kardigan ($KARD) expected to price, SonoThera $125M Series B, City $100M Series B, Ethyreal $101M Series A, big secondary raises, $SMMT’s $500M follow-on pulled, deals: $INCY/Vega ($2B), $GSK/$NUVL ($10.6B), Roche/$NRIX ($3B), $JNJ/Firefly ($1B), $LLY/AlzeCure, $NVS/Orionis, data: $TNGX/$RVMD in 2L pancreatic cancer & readthroughs to $IDYA, $SNY CIDP miss hits $DNTH stock, $TAK’s oral TYK2 beats $BMY in Ph3 head-to-head, Sensorion drops hearing loss gene therapy, #EHA2026, $NGNE dosing safety update, plus Blood Cancer United buys remaining supply of Luvelta, & much more: twitter.com/i/spaces/1qJDzzD…
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After a few biotech deal leaks, @EricSchmidt151 asks “What's the point of leaking something less than 24 hours before an announcement?” @mroliverbarnes shares, “I mean, for the average investor, it has way less of a value add, doesn't it?...Sometimes with companies that have a complex deal, they want to make sure that the market really understands and so working with someone and explaining that can be a good way of setting out their stall. But on the whole, as I said, most of these things don't have a strategic logic to it.” #BiotechHangout
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$GSK gets access to two late-stage lung cancer assets – zidesamtinib and neladalkib - in an acquisition deal with $NUVL. @mroliverbarnes talks about why this deal is notable for $GSK given the relatively small deals from the company in the recent past. “The thing that's striking about this for $GSK is its size and its ambition in oncology…It is basically their largest deal ever, which is a big, big thing for a new CEO who's just six months into the job and, in that, I'm sure he's telegraphing to the market that this is something that we probably can imagine is going to continue.” #BiotechHangout
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.@EricSchmidt151 on the interest around RAS inhibitors including $JNJ acquisition of Firefly: “This is a pathway that's drawing a lot of attention, including from new oncology players like $JNJ, I think if you look forward to future M&A and business development transactions, especially focusing on oncology, there's probably no pathway that's more ripe for deals and acquisitions and collaborations than RAS inhibition. Right now, the thing's on fire...We're just seeing better and better clinical results from combinations and all sorts of other players in the field. So welcome, $JNJ. I'm sure they won't be the last.” #BiotechHangout
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.@mroliverbarnes on the significance of the deal for $INCY: “What $INCY effectively sees here is potentially towards a kind of blockbuster drug. When you think about a blockbuster drug, big pharma (the $100B market cap companies) tend to go after multi blockbuster drugs, because that's what they need to fill the hole in in their revenues that come from patent cliffs. With $INCY, Jakafi is coming off patent in 2028. Getting a high hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, or towards a billion dollars in revenue, is a big deal, and that's why we often see these mid-sized drug makers hunting for these smaller biotech targets increasingly nowadays.” #BiotechHangout
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.@EricSchmidt151 on the recent data from $TNGX: “The exciting data that we've seen is all in combination with the $RVMD Ras inhibitor combinations, and most exciting is the combination of daraxonrasib, the multi-RAS inhibitor from $RVMD, with vopimetostat. That's the data that showed a 90 plus percent response rate, just a response that is off the charts, that I don't think anyone would have fathomed days ago, let alone months or years ago… So, hats off to the team at Tango.” #BiotechHangout
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.@MatteisPaul on the $SMMT offering, “If you're an investor looking to buy the stock, you're almost wondering if there's going to be a better entry point or a better liquidity event. We've seen how concerns about how a stock might trade can transcend the actual fundamentals of the stock sometimes.” @soowannaway (Graig Suvannavejh) adds: “I was at the plenary session where they did announce the data. I would agree that on the face of the data in themselves, which were good, it would be very interesting to have seen what would have happened to the stock if the follow-up presentation by a KOL to opine on the data went very differently.” #BiotechHangout
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$SMMT cancels its $500 million secondary share offering, citing market conditions. “Certainly, this company can use the money. They don't have a particularly strong cash balance, and certainly they've got a lot of things they can do with the money. They're running multiple Phase 3 studies, so you know all signs pointed to that offering being successful,” said @EricSchmidt151. “And yet it was pulled. I assume there was a price at which the deal would have cleared. I assume that price was distasteful to the $SMMT management team.” #BiotechHangout
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"The dynamic between IPOs, M&A, and whether to sell before the IPO, the whole dual track thing, is in the last couple of years, because broadly speaking, biotech capital markets have been shut down a lot, there's been a degree of desperation driving some of the private sales,” says @mroliverbarnes. “Whereas now we're seeing a different dynamic where there's actual real competitive tension, and the $INCY deal with Star Therapeutics to buy Vega – a subsidiary of Star - is a perfect example." #BiotechHangout
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On the biotech market discussion, @EricSchmidt151 adds: “Maybe the natural progression is to go from launch in 2025 to shiny pipeline candidates in 2026 to platform stocks in 2027…today's IPO window is a little bit of a Goldilocks scenario, where it's selective and quality-driven and data-oriented, but not closed. And that's exactly the kind of market that we always asked for, right?” #BiotechHangout
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.@MatteisPaul offers his take on the landscape: “I still feel like the bar is higher than it's been historically, but at the end of the day, given how long the window was closed, I think there's still a backlog of private companies with real data in Phase 1 or 2 type studies, or real technologies that have value…last year was the year of the launch story, and this year is the year of the shiny pipeline asset to some degree.” #BiotechHangout
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.@soowannaway (Graig Suvannavejh) sums up the potentially positive outlook on IPOs for biotech this year: “By mid-year, we'll likely have had, I think, 12 or so companies IPO that's raising collectively over $4 billion. And given this positivity, I'd like to think that the window for private companies to consider an IPO remains very open, and investor appetite is there but obviously it will depend on the type of story.” #BiotechHangout
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Kicking off the show this week, the hosts give a bird’s eye view of where things stand in the biotech market. “At a high level, it's been a bit choppy of late, but I think things overall are still pretty healthy in biotech,” says @soowannaway (Graig Suvannavejh). “Just looking at performance year-to-date for biotech, looking at the $XBI as a proxy, is still nicely in positive territory as of yesterday's close.” #BiotechHangout
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New $ELVN data at #EHA26
Enliven Therapeutics’ leukemia drug shows promise in new study statnews.com/2026/06/11/enli… $MRK
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Over the past two years, Genentech has laid off or lost Ira Mellman, Shannon Turley, and now Vishva Dixit!
What is happening at Genentech?
Jun 11
SCOOP: Roche’s Genentech underwent another round of layoffs this week in its early research and development group, Endpoints News has learned, which included shuttering two research units and the departure of several senior researchers.
My latest here: endpoints.news/exclusive-gen…
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