| | | |   | Good morning! Damian Garde here, reporting from biotech's awkward post-New Year, pre-J.P. Morgan week. The sector had a 2021 to forget, but the XBI is up about 3% in the first trading day of 2022, inviting all manner of rose-colored predictions. | | | Jury finds Theranos founder Holmes guilty of fraud Elizabeth Holmes, the former Theranos CEO who promised to revolutionize medicine but whose company collapsed under the weight of its many misrepresentations, was found guilty of fraud on yesterday, capping a years-long saga that came to symbolize Silicon Valley hubris.
After seven days of deliberations, a jury convicted Holmes of four counts of lying to investors while raising money for Theranos and found her not guilty of four counts of defrauding patients. The jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict on three counts of defrauding individual investors, possibly leaving the door open for a retrial on those specific charges.
Each of the four counts of wire fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, but they will likely be served concurrently. The court is yet to schedule a sentencing hearing for Holmes.
Read more. | Biotech in 2022: Things probably can’t get worse By every available quantitative metric, biotech had an abysmal 2021. And, thanks to the analysts at Cowen and their regular Biotech Thermometer, we have qualitative confirmation, too.
Investors interviewed by Cowen “entered holiday vacations bruised, depressed, and ready to disengage,” the analysts wrote, adding that “a good number of clients have told us 2021 was the worst year of their professional lives.” The most common topic in those interviews was whether rumors of a given fund shutting down for good were indeed true.
But from that malaise springs some hope. For one, the closely watched XBI index has never had two consecutive down years, Cowen notes. And the stuff that typically makes biotech stocks go up — new technologies, good data, and drug approvals — remains intact. The best-case scenario is that the damage is done and 2021’s miles of red tape added up to a correction from which biotech can only rise. | How can digital interventions increase flu vaccination rates among people with diabetes? Convenient, low-cost digital messaging can improve the rate of influenza vaccination in people with diabetes. This key takeaway was among the findings in a recent study conducted by Evidation in partnership with Sanofi. The study, published in npj Digital Medicine, shows people with diabetes who received digital content via Evidation’s Achievement platform were more likely to get vaccinated. Learn more about the study and the results. | After Cambridge and San Francisco, ‘Why not Texas?’ Texas wants to become a biotech hub and is investing in a research triangle all its own with hopes of rivaling the established clusters to its east and west. There’s no shortage of money, space, and volition, but is building a biomedical hub as simple as assembling the necessary parts?
As STAT’s Maddie Bender reports, Texas aims to find out. The cities of Austin, Dallas, and Houston are joining forces on what organizers have billed the Texas Triangle. The anchor institutions will be a massive life science campus under construction in Houston, a research park planned for Dallas, and a startup scene already growing in Austin.
The idea is to build a critical mass of talent, infrastructure, and capital such that the biotech startups of the future will grow out of Texas-based research and choose to stay in the state when it’s time to expand. “It’s no longer ‘Why Texas?’” said Kieron Jones, CEO of the Houston incubator space K2bio. “The better question is, ‘Why not Texas?’”
Read more. | After a whirlwind Covid response, the FDA’s next challenge is normalcy Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s biologics division, steered the department through the breakneck reviews of vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. Now that the pace has slowed, Marks’ next task is similarly daunting: Getting a massive bureaucracy to pick up where it left off without losing sight of the ongoing pandemic.
In a wide-ranging interview with STAT’s Nicholas Florko, Marks said there’s still a “tremendous workload,” and that some aspects of his department will need between six and 12 months to get back up to speed. But “morale has really been quite remarkably good,” he said, and FDA staff is up for the challenge.
“2022 will have to be a year where we transition to working alongside the pandemic, as opposed to being dominated by the pandemic,” Marks said.
Read more. | More reads - Biotech sector faces hurdles after an explosive year. Wall Street Journal
- Confessions of a ‘human guinea pig’: Why I’m resigning from Moderna vaccine trials. STAT
- Medicare needs to test the new Alzheimer’s drug before paying. Bloomberg
- FDA authorizes first Covid-19 booster shot for teens aged 12 to 15. STAT
| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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