Brian Finrow

Uncommon results like this are commonplace at Lumen Bio. Requires a team with uncommon talent — talented people like YOU! Join us! Especially — right now — if you have a passion for clinical trials or assay qualification/validation.

@cremieuxrecueil Many such buttons lying about, it seems pharmexec.com/view/fda-power…

It's extremely delightful seeing the third world slop replaced by Japanese gemposts. Who knew you could just flip the switch and beautify the timeline!

@varma_ashwin97 @Banana_Oncology @DrPaulyDeSantis You and me both, brother

@Finrow @Banana_Oncology @DrPaulyDeSantis So this uses public ER forecasts, but I'd be curious for the actual forecasts of industry execs! :)

Another interesting biopharma fact: $MRK management expected Pembro to bring in $500m peak annual sales at best case scenario, early in clinical development Pembro brought in $32b last year for $MRK Not too far off

@varma_ashwin97 @Banana_Oncology @DrPaulyDeSantis Nice piece here quantifying that insight: nature.com/articles/nrd41…

@Banana_Oncology @DrPaulyDeSantis Source?

@beffjezos @jrkelly pharmexec.com/view/fda-power…

The fact that drug development has to be done in China because of FDA overregulation should be alarming. We need to deregulate in order to accelerate biotech progress in the United States. Eroom's law must come to an end. Enough.

When asked abt the benefits of AI, most CEOs of AI companies point to its potential in medicine. I'm hopeful too, but claims like "it will make clinical trials last 1 year" do not take into account the actual constraints. writingruxandrabio.com/p/a-response-t…

@davidycli Seems right. Interesting that most biotech VCs say (i) “platforms are out” and (ii) strongly prefer outsource-maxing clinical affairs to the big CROs (“best practices”) to building that in-house. Which big biotech firms are the bucking these trends, anyone know?

the only viable US biotechs going fwd are: i) novel platform tech (better way to find target, have better selectivity, or super power efficacy in a particular modality) OR ii) clinical team that can "king-make" a best in class mlc from China or an AI shop (ie uniquely experienced team for a particular disease indication that has specific expertise for shepherding programs through difficult to execute indications eg rare disease, respiratory, etc) every co in the middle (potential best in class mlc w/o differentiated clinical team, me-better approaches, and even novel targets without unique clinical strategy) is on the clock

This is a remarkable chart. Hep b vaccines previously had extremely high uptake because the first dose is administered in the hospital at birth. Almost no other vaccine has this level of uptake. This tells me recommendations matter, and we should be much less certain about the expected penetration of new vaccines.

Don't know this particular SPAC, but in the normal case one cannot fund the interest on the trust fund with warrants — that's typically at the 3-month Tbill rate + vig, so real money on a $200m SPAC. And while some professional fees are deferred (e.g., 1/2 IPO banker fee), most must be paid current. So all in, easily >$5-$10m of *somebody's* cash (depending on size) must be put at risk. If all that was fully funded with warrant sales as you say (btw, seems weird—never seen that—are you sure he's not just referring to the customary $11.50 strike "incentive" warrants that the trust fund investors get to keep even upon withdrawal?), that it doesn't solve the mystery—just shifts it (to these background capital providers) and deepens it (why would they do it given the warrants are even worse economics than the promoter share?). LMK if you figure out the mystery, we've also been stumped by the promoter incentives since the SPAC bubble burst. Seems like raw exploitation of promoters by hedge funds. Or DM me and I can share with you the model I worked up to try to understand it.

"Our survey does not support oral administration expanding the addressable market". Ok, well then you wrote a shitty survey. *Safe* oral options expand market sizes, period. File that under things you don't need a doc survey to teach you.

Working at night is pretty brutal for health, but a lot of people in the past were obliged to do it, as they didn't have better options. The premium for working at night has only grown, but the number of people willing to do it has fallen steeply. A tidbit of hidden progress.

The entire article contains a lot of gems that illustrate the absurdity of the industry. Everyone can go through the problems described and categorise how many of them are solvable purely through AI. Basically... none

Much more at the link. Mostly mischievous—this would take huge boldness to adopt as policy—but I haven't seen the idea floated anywhere else so thought it important to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps @RuxandraTeslo @kroetscha @joshcmorrison @ATabarrok would know.

It would also be a step in the right direction toward leveling the clinical research playing field U.S. drug developers vis-à-vis China and other jurisdictions. finrow.substack.com/p/china-biotec…

Kids these days tell me "you can just do stuff", and quite right. But did you know that when it comes to accelerating U.S. drug development, it's sometimes actually easier to just *NOT* do stuff? New piece from yours truly in PharmaExec, slightly puckish. (link in replies)

Funny how these articles about copying China never recommend building 1000 coal power plants, or cutting Social Security and Medicare in half.

Ascertainment bias seems right to me—nice turn of phrase. Perhaps also involved might be hubris (I’m smart, mine will be better than those other dopes) and the principal-agent problem. Many business organizations have this latter issue. For example, pre-2008 bankers got quarterly volume bonuses for securitizing subprime loans; their rottenness exploded years later, but no refunds are due. Similarly if getting logos for the “hot area” helps you raise a next venture fund, well, you’re guaranteed 2% for 10 years (ar at least a healthy salary) with a free option on the 20% carry—maybe it’ll work out!; losses go to the LPs. You may be retired by then. (To be clear, not all funds are set up this way; and there are antidotes.) And pharma CEOs who make big splashy acquisitions in the hot area get an immediate stock bump, and may not even be at the same company if/when it gets written down later given the length of drug development timelines. Behavior follows incentives, and incentives mediate the efficient markets hypothesis (to the extent it has any explanatory power at all). But I like @jackscannell13 ‘s bias explanation because it’s more hopeful and polite.

@JackScannell13 I agree with your first point entirely. But it is the second that interests me more! The 50th PD-1 drug is being funded by presumably smart people who don’t want to lose their $!

It may be that failure to count competitors stampeding towards your de-risked target is now the single biggest reason drug R&D programs fail in Phase 2 & 3. "Commercial" termination overtakes "efficacy" circa 2019: nature.com/articles/d4157… Recent oncology example (TIGIT herding): bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/5/1/e0…

Heuristics for lab robotics, and where its future may go (8.4k words, 38 minutes reading time) owlposting.com/p/heuristics-f… this is the longest article i have ever written. in it, i discuss the three ideologies of lab robotics progress, why they may all converge on the same business model, whether any of it will be actually helpful for the problems that plague drug discovery the most, and more this article involved discussions with sixteen people over the course of three weeks, and i am very grateful to them for answering the many questions i had about a field that i had long considered alien finally: this is a complicated field that is really still being birthed, so please let me know if i got anything wrong