Biotech, investing, sports, culture. Cui bono?
Bay Area
Joined December 2019
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A fun exercise I'm trying out is a running list of cool, ideally lesser known companies I run into. Not only is this a good current resource, but it'll be useful to go back and see how things evolved over time.
I'll post them here. As a disclaimer, themes will vary and I may know the founders / have relationships with the folks involved.
Separate from the current pro-rata rights debate, one of the most thought-provoking things I heard in VC was that “investing pro rata is, by definition, almost always wrong.”
As an insider, you have an updated view of the thesis every round. Blindly taking pro rata is just lazy.
the Day One - Valar controversy made me realize that we're really in a hot market when the the right to invest is being squabbled over
only a few years ago the challenge was to figure out how to get insiders TO keep investing into an uncertain follow-on / exit horizon, not FROM investing more into it
Imagine seeing the most dynamic market environment in over two decades and thinking "it's all over there's nothing left to build"
there's got to be a word in another language for the satisfaction of when something lives up to the hype
reading East of Eden for the first time and I get why people won't shut up about Steinbeck. The imagery of deeply specific places that feel universal and these little turns of phrase that are just so precise but say so much about human condition. technically marvelous
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
The vast majority of biopharma/biotech spent a decade plus dismissing AI as hype and nonsense and the thing is that they were demonstrably right on the seemingly dismissable nature of the AI, its immediate capabilities and its near term growth at basically every point along the curve... until it became undeniable that the entire economy was going to be dominated by AI and pharma was no exception.
When you are in these seats of long standing success, power and prestige the danger is that you are right in your long standing views and supported by all the data as being right until you are just beginning to be wrong
With the risk then you are behind those who committed and understood how the tide was changing earlier and bought in at the right time
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
We benchmarked the comprehensiveness of our free pipeline database against a leading paid incumbent database -- our asset coverage is 28% higher overall. If you're paying for a pipeline database and not happy with the data quality try ours out at platform.convoke.bio
$NVS signs a $7.8B+ deal with 🇨🇳 Abogen Biosciences to advance mRNA-encoded therapeutics, including an in vivo CD19xCD3 T-cell engager for autoimmune diseases. abogenbio.com/news/company/n…
💰 Deal terms:
• $575M upfront
• Up to ~$7.2B in potential milestone payments if all options are exercised
• Potential royalties on future product sales
• Exclusive worldwide license to lead asset ABO2203
• Options to exclusively license additional programs from Abogen’s RNA platform
ABO2203 is an mRNA-encoded CD19xCD3 T-cell engager.
Abogen says ABO2203 is the first mRNA-encoded T-cell engager to enter clinical evaluation for autoimmune diseases.
Founded around RNA innovation, Abogen has an AI- and automation-driven mRNA/LNP platform.
Its pipeline covers oncology, autoimmune diseases and vaccines, including ABO1108, a lyophilized mRNA shingles vaccine in Phase 3 trials in China.
coverage universe size going to be the biggest competitive advantage in the next 5 years. being able to flex + see the world across 200 names you kinda know is going to be much more important than grinding out 50 expert calls on something unless you’re gunning for 10xers. think we will see a bifurcation between super pods enabled by AI and VC-like “hunting for 10 baggers” for the concentrated guys. everyone wise probably dies
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
I'm at ARDD in Boston this week. Apropos of the conference, @PeterAttiaMD dropped a new podcast on longevity drug development.
Lloyd Klickstein is one of the few people in pharma who has done bona fide longevity drug development: mTOR inhibitors, bimagrumab, now cancer prevention
When I was at NIBR, I had the pleasure of meeting Lloyd. I was really inspired by how his Translational Medicine team built programs from the ground up with the end patient in mind
His conversation with Peter is a rare look at the full lifecycle of a first-in-class drug told in first-person using bimagrumab: discovery though clinical development, deprioritization, spin-out, revival, and eventually acquisition
The podcast left me thinking about the importance of measurement
What endpoints actually matter to patients?
Which of those can you measure?
Which can you quantify well enough to run a trial?
One of the early programs Llyod discusses was fall prevention. Falls matter to older adults. His team built a fall-detection device. But it only caught 20% of real falls. 80% of its alarms were false positives. That result points to a key bottleneck in longevity drug development.
As I argued before, osteoporosis is the precedent.
DXA made bone density measurable. The WHO turned a bone density T-score into a diagnosis. Then the drugs followed.
Hopefully the recent SABRE decision recognizing BMD as a surrogate endpoint will catalyze a renaissance in novel, first-in-class drugs for osteoporosis.
If you're at ARDD and want to learn about the future of osteoporosis care including fall and hip fracture prevention, please reach out.
We're working with the end in mind to build drugs for that keep people independent and stronger, for longer.
peterattiamd.com/lloydklicks…
blog.egan.bio/p/evolution-of…
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
Much effort has gone into improving and benchmarking LLM performance on drug discovery, but what about commercial, development, or operational work?
In our new biopharma knowledge work benchmark, we find that OpenAI models lead with strong performance on a diverse set of tasks
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
The current barrier to greater AI diffusion isn’t model capability. In my eyes, the barrier is three things (in order):
1. Most people don’t understand what AI can do
2. They need to fundamentally think differently about their life and work
3. Human preference. Even if AI can do the thing, people still want to do it (like shopping)
Each layer is a more rigid barrier. First, someone must be motivated to understand.
Then, they have to build a habit of flipping their thinking to a more AI-forward way. They need to consider how they would deconstruct and assign out work as if they were a manager. They need to understand abstract capabilities and apply them to their own use cases, or understand what previous use cases were uneconomical that are now available.
Then they need to want to assign that task out to AI in the first place
All of this leads me to believe that we are still incredibly early. It will take 3-5 years for the middle of the curve to even understand today’s AI capabilities and change their mindset to put this technology to work on their behalf. And by then we will be much more advanced.
The technological capability isn’t the blocker. It’s our understanding, creativity, and preferences that will determine the pace of diffusion
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
We've significantly improved the preclinical and China coverage of our free drug pipeline tracker in the past week or so. If you're in biopharma corp dev or investing check it out and let us know what you think! (link in quoted post)
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
Today, there's a strong focus on fast-follows of existing drugs. The drug programs that inspire me look different – the target is known, but we don't know how to build the drug, often requiring the dev of new tech that paves the path for more drugs.
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
Had been thinking about this a lot recently
Does KRAS inhibition deserve a Nobel prize? Both tricomplex inhibition and initial cysteine attack on G12C
I believe these have much bigger impacts on cancer patient survivals than CTLA4?
Daraxonrisab from $RVMD
My mom has been on it since Feb for stage 4 pancreatic cancer with mets in her liver. We are coming up on a year since her diagnosis.
We were told it was inoperable and prognosis was grim (3-6 months) then we found out about the trial.
Update:
47% reduction in tumor size and Mets in her liver are GONE!
This company deserves a Nobel prize.
Anyone who has pancreatic cancer or a loved one that does, my dm’s are open. Can share our experience - the good, the bad and the ugly, dosage, cohort data, and other anecdotes. Can probably give you more info on it than your oncologist at this point.
It’s still pancreatic cancer so it’s a journey and some days are better and worse than others but this drug is a breakthrough on arguably the most fatal form of cancer and in my opinion the most effective treatment on the market with more tolerable side effects than chemo.
Merouane Ounadjela retweeted
With $LLY acquiring Merida Bio & MER511 this morning, might as well briefly go over various TSHR-related programs in development for Graves & TED.
