They want to genetically modify more than just the crops as "gene therapy" is meant to be ubiquitous and never-ending going forward, cui bono?
That's where the p$ychopaths who stole all the money are pu$hing things if the pre$$ $poke$people are to be believed, in what will no doubt be a horrific anti-human being dy$topia and Borg collective circling us all.
It's an octopus that is hard to get a hold of as it buys up all the property as part of the Great Communi$t Re$et, for lack of a better term.
"Ginkgo plans a $17.5 billion merger with SPAC that took DraftKings public" by Jonathan Saltzman and Anissa Gardizy Globe Staff, May 11, 2021
Ginkgo Bioworks, one of the hottest biotech startups in Massachusetts, said Tuesday that it plans to go public through a $17.5 billion merger with a so-called blank check company backed by Harry Sloan and Jeff Sagansky, the veteran media industry executives who helped take the Boston sports-betting company DraftKings public last year.
The deal values Ginkgo at $15 billion, making the merger one of the biggest of its kind. Ginkgo programs cells to produce new proteins, scents, antibiotics, cannabinoids, and other products for a growing array of industries. Launched in 2008 by five scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it now employs about 500 people, most of them in Boston’s Seaport.
[That is one hell of a blank check]
The merger with Soaring Eagle Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, is expected to fetch $2.5 billion for the combined entity, according to Ginkgo. A SPAC is a shell corporation listed on a stock exchange for the purpose of acquiring a private company, thus taking it public without all the paperwork of a traditional initial public offering.
[The $tock market is literally a $hell game to enrich the u$ual $u$pects, with devastating results for the rest of us]
Jason Kelly, Ginkgo’s cofounder and chief executive, said his firm was attractive because the world has seen the extraordinary potential of engineered biology, from the groundbreaking messenger RNA coronavirus vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to tasty animal-free proteins used in the latest generation of meatless burgers.
[Straight out of the damn WEF playbook!]
“From mRNA vaccines reaching people’s arms to combating climate change, the opportunity to work with programmed cells has never been more apparent,” he said. “Ginkgo’s platform makes it easier to program this code, and we are making this platform available to organizations working to solve our most pressing problems.”
[See how they roll the whole damn agenda together when the two have nothing to do with each other -- apart from climate change and CVD being total frauds and ma$$ive lies?]
Ginkgo has cut several multimillion-dollar deals in recent years, including one with Toronto-based Cronos Group for $122 million to produce cultured cannabinoids, another with the Swiss drug giant Roche that’s worth up to $160 million to discover novel antibiotics, and another with Cambridge-based Synlogic, in which Ginkgo invested $80 million to speed the development of living medicines. During the pandemic, Ginkgo created Concentric by Ginkgo, a COVID-19 testing program to help schools and businesses reopen.
One need not be stoned to see through the haze of the $elf-inflicted cri$i$ for ulterior and nefarious motives at this stage.
The smoke has cleared away and we can see]
Under the merger announced Tuesday, a number of investors have pledged $775 million, including Baillie Gifford, Putnam Investments, and accounts managed by Counterpoint Global.
Soaring Eagle, the blank check company that will merge with Ginkgo, was founded last year by former Hollywood executives Sloan, Sagansky, and Eli Baker of Eagle Equity Partners. They helped take DraftKings public last year in another SPAC merger. SPACs have long existed on the fringes of the financial world but have surged in popularity in the last year or two.
Although science and gambling would appear to have few things in common, Sloan said in a conference call Tuesday that he is attracted to companies like DraftKings and Ginkgo because they are in a “category of one.”
“These are companies that are not only leaders in their field but actually created the field themselves,” he said. “That is certainly the case with Ginkgo and synthetic biology.”
[How do you feel about your health care being in their hand$?
Makes me $ick]
He said he learned about Ginkgo from a Soaring Eagle board member who works with Arie Belldegrun, a cell- and gene-therapy veteran and founder of Kite Pharma and Allogene Therapeutics, who saw Ginkgo’s potential to merge with a blank check company.
“It was Arie’s very deep knowledge in life science and his excitement about Ginkgo which caused us to decide to partner,” Sloan said.
Belldegrun and Soaring Eagle are cosponsoring the $1.73 billion SPAC investment and participating in a private investment round with other investors.
Kelly said during the conference call that he spoke with several SPACs about a possible merger, but viewed Belldegrun’s involvement with Ginkgo as a big plus, given the latter’s background in drug making. Both Sloan and Belldegrun will join Ginkgo’s board of directors.
“If you want to do the large, commercial partnerships that we do with pharma companies, you need breakthrough technology, and you also need credibility with that community,” said Kelly, who will lead the combined company.
Ginkgo makes money two ways, according to Kelly. It charges companies for research and development that it does in its foundry, and it licenses those findings, or the code it has written, back to the customer in exchange for royalties on the sale of a product or an equity stake in the firm.
Last year, Ginkgo generated $64 million in revenue from research and development, Kelly said, and it expects that number to top $1 billion in 2025. Ginkgo has worked on 54 programs since 2017. In 2025, Kelly said, Ginkgo expects to start more than 500 new programs.
Ginkgo was one of the first life-sciences companies to put down roots in the Seaport. It occupies about 200,000 square feet of research and cell-design facilities, some of it in the Innovation and Design Building. In April, it announced that it had agreed to lease an additional 150,000 square feet across the street in an eight-story lab building proposed by Marcus Partners, along Fid Kennedy Avenue in the Raymond L. Flynn Marine Industrial Park. Work on the building, which needs city approval, would start next year and be completed in 2024.
Ginkgo also occupies more than 63,000 square feet in two buildings in Cambridge, where it expects to have about 70 employees by the end of May, according to a spokesman.
I'm told their goal is to make the gene therapy manufacturing production process more efficient to bring you to your knees.
"Marc Archambault is well aware of the controversy surrounding Biogen’s new drug for Alzheimer’s disease, including that three members of a scientific advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration quit in protest last week after the agency approved it over the panel’s objections. Still, he was thrilled to roll up the left sleeve of his blue button-down shirt Wednesday at Butler Hospital in Providence to receive one of the first intravenous infusions of the drug, Aduhelm, since its June 7 approval. He wasn’t concerned that many in the scientific community say evidence that it works is thin. “I’m comfortable with it a hundred percent, and whatever happens, happens,” said Archambault, 70, a real estate broker in South Kingstown, R.I. “I think it’s going to be great, and I wanted to be part of it.” He also appeared to question the empathy of the three physician scientists who quit the advisory committee that overwhelmingly recommended in November that the FDA reject the drug in light of contradictory results in two large clinical trials....."
The courageous truth tellers have been scorned throughout history, so why should now be any different?
One can get depressed when one realizes how easy it is to win FDA approval for things that don't work but are harmful.
Related:
"A Mass. software engineer’s bot helped people find vaccine appointments. Now he’s shut it down, and the thank-yous are rolling in" by Martin Finucane Globe Staff, June 10, 2021
A Massachusetts software developer’s Twitter bot offered help to those seeking vaccine appointments at a time they were frustratingly scarce. Now he’s shut it down, and hundreds of people are saying thank you.
Developer Dan Cahoon tweeted on Wednesday, “With vaccines now readily available in Massachusetts I’m going to turn off vaccinetime,” and he referred people to the state’s website.
The tweet garnered more than 230 replies by midafternoon Thursday, with many saying they had used the bot to get not only themselves but others vaccinated. The replies reflected the tense times the state saw when vaccines were first made available but there wasn’t enough supply to meet the demand.
“It’s really great to see how many people it was able to help,” said Cahoon, a software developer at Ginkgo Bioworks. He said he developed the bot in his spare time after watching colleagues struggle to find appointments on the multiple websites where they were listed.
While media outlets earlier this year included bots in their lists of tips on how to get a vaccine appointment, some critics have said they gave the tech-savvy an advantage. Cahoon said he felt his bot leveled the playing field between people who only had limited time to search for appointments and people who had the time to sit at the screen for hours clicking away.
“Hopefully, it brought a little more fairness to the system,” Cahoon said. He also said that if the unthinkable happens and there’s another pandemic, it would be better if there was a single website people could go to and preregister.
After enduring the early frustrations, the state is now a national leader in vaccinations.
The safe and effective vaccines are free for people who live, work, or study in the state. People 12 to 17 can receive the Pfizer vaccine. People 18 and older can receive either the Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the state says.....
Time to $pin off to $omething new:
"Ginkgo’s spinout Motif to release plant-based meat tech after raising $226 million" by Anissa Gardizy Globe Staff, June 16, 2021
The plant-based food startup that spun out of Ginkgo Bioworks is getting ready to unveil its first product.
Boston’s Motif FoodWorks, with $226 million in new funding, announced on Wednesday that it plans to release food technology designed to improve the taste and aroma of meat alternatives by the end of the year. Another product designed to add texture and juiciness to fake meat is expected to be available next year.
The developments come more than two years after Ginkgo started Motif to break out its food business, inspired by the successes of other companies like Impossible Foods, which uses science to mimic the attributes of animal meat with its Impossible Burger.
[This is an abomination and remember this when the planned and forced famines hit.
The population has no idea, just like 100 years ago, but the genocide is being waged on a global scale this time with the benefit of poisonous gene therapies called vaccines
I know it is tough to choke down, but there it is]
The difference with Motif is that instead of releasing its own line of foods, it plans to partner with companies that may not want to develop the tech behind plant-based food on their own. A Motif spokesperson said that in many cases, a consumer packaged goods company would include Motif’s technology in a plant-based product it plans to sell in retail settings.
“Plant-based foods have the potential to unlock enormous benefits for people and the planet, but that will only happen if they live up to, or even exceed, what consumers expect from animal-based counterparts,” said Jonathan McIntyre, the chief executive of Motif, in a press release.
[Enjoy your nutritious gruel from the lord of the manor]
Motif’s website indicates that it is also working on improving the stretchiness of plant-based cheese and the creaminess of dairy alternatives. The new funding, which brings Motif’s total haul to $345 million, will allow the company to add at least 50 people to its 35-person team by the end of the year.
The food startup is located in a 10,000-square-foot space in the same building as Ginkgo in the Seaport District. Ginkgo announced last month that it plans to go public through a $17.5 billion merger with a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company.
The Motif funding round was led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, through its investment arm that backs growing technology companies, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Additional new and previous investors also participated in the round.
[Nothing wrong with any of that, right?
It's all good?]
How do you like their logo?
Time to cannibalize the rest.
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"Waltham biotech raises $110 million for gene therapy treatments" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, May 3, 2021
Affinia Therapeutics, a Waltham-based biotech working on gene therapies to treat diseases using technology developed at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, said Monday it has raised $110 million in a new venture capital round.
[The venture capital money comes from pension funds and college endowments as well as private equity, so the ba$ic effect is funding our own demise at the hands of these mon$ters]
The company, which was founded in 2019 based on work pioneered by Luk Vandenberghe, an associate professor at Mass. Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School, plans to use the money to advance its gene therapy technology and move experimental drug programs into clinical trials.
Gene therapies are among the most promising, if technologically challenging, areas of medicine. By engineering a virus to carry functioning genes to cells to compensate for defective ones, drug makers have developed several revolutionary treatments for devastating genetic diseases, from a rare neurodegenerative disorder to a form of blindness.
[You can see where the "viru$" come from now, right?
It's in the "vaxxeens"]
The one-time treatments can be breathtakingly expensive, with price tags of $1 million or more. Proponents, however, say such expensive medicines may actually be cost-effective by curing debilitating diseases that strain the health care system if treated for years with conventional drugs and hospitalizations.
The $110 million raised by Affinia supplements $60 million in financing that the firm announced in March of last year. The latest round was led by EcoR1 Capital and Farallon Capital Management, both based in San Francisco.
Additional new investors include Avidity Partners, Casdin Capital, GV, Octagon Capital, Perceptive Advisors, RA Capital Management, TCG Crossover, and Woodline Partners LP. Previous investors Atlas Venture, F-Prime Capital, Lonza, Mass General Brigham Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates also participated in the round.
I'm losing my Affinia for the Globe by the minute.
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"Cambridge cancer drug startup Nuvalent raises $135 million; The new funding comes just four months after it was launched with $50 million" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, May 11, 2021
Nuvalent, a Cambridge biotech working on precision cancer drugs, has raised another $135 million in venture capital just four months after the firm was launched with $50 million in financing.
The startup is developing lung cancer drugs that rely on enzyme blockers known as kinase inhibitors to help keep cancer cells from growing. Nuvalent hopes to use cash from the second round of financing to advance two potential drugs into clinical trials.
Nuvalent also recently announced the appointment of Dr. Christopher Turner, an oncology expert and former vice president of clinical development at Cambridge-based Blueprint Medicines, as chief medical officer.
“The milestones that we announced today support our significant achievements since our public launch in January 2021 and the tremendous potential that we believe Nuvalent has,” said James Porter, the company’s chief executive.
The technology behind Nuvalent’s scientific approach was developed with guidance from Matthew Shair, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. He serves as founder, head scientific adviser, and a member of the board of directors.
The latest financing round was led by Bain Capital Life Sciences with participation from the founding investor Deerfield Management, and 10 new investors, including Fidelity Management and Research Company, Wellington Management Company, and Viking Global Investors. Dr. Andrew Hack, a managing director at Bain, will join Nuvalent’s board of directors.
[What a $hock!]
Related:
"Verve Therapeutics, a Cambridge biotech startup that wants to use gene editing to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease, made a successful stock market debut Thursday, with its share price surging more than 60 percent. Verve shares closed at $31.92, up 68 percent from the initial $19 offering. That offering was itself above the price of $16 to $18 that Verve had previously set. The stock is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol VERV. Verve sold more than 14 million shares in its IPO, raising nearly $267 million from investors enthusiastic about its novel approach to treating cardiovascular disease with the genome-editing tool CRISPR. The company wants to make gene-editing medicines that mimic genetic mutations that naturally prevent some people from developing high levels of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol, or high levels of triglycerides, or both....."
Oh, the Verve as the Globe tours the labs.
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Can you $ee yet?
"Atlas launches second Cambridge biotech to tackle vision loss; The new company has raised $77 million in venture capital" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, May 18, 2021
Call it “Quest for Sight: The Sequel.”
In September, the Swiss drug giant Novartis paid $150 million for a Cambridge startup that had developed a pair of potential gene therapies to restore vision to people with blindness stemming from genetic diseases. It was a sizable return for the biotech, which had used roughly half of the $21 million in venture capital it had raised after its founding about 17 months earlier by Atlas Venture.
Now the same research and leadership team behind Vedere Bio has launched Vedere Bio II, a second Cambridge biotech working on other experimental gene therapies for vision loss, including retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. The new company has raised $77 million in venture capital and is headed by the same chief executive, who said he’s not thinking about a sale to another pharma giant ― at least not yet.....
Related:
"Lexington biotech licenses experimental cancer drug to Bristol Myers Squibb for $200m; It’s the biggest such deal for Agenus since the company was founded in 1994" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, May 18, 2021
The Lexington-based biotech Agenus has licensed an experimental cancer-fighting drug to the pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb for $200 million, the biotech’s largest licensing deal since it was founded in 1994.
[The shots are experimental as well for the lab rats they call sheeple]
Agenus, which works on medicines that harness the body’s immune system to treat cancer, said Tuesday that Bristol Myers Squibb will advance the development of an immuno-oncology drug that shows promise against tumors, including non-small cell lung cancer.
[I know a tumor I think should be cut out from the American body politic, but that's a different subject]
If the drug meets development, regulatory, and commercial milestones, Agenus could receive up to $1.36 billion more, under the agreement with New York-based Bristol Myers Squibb. Agenus has no approved drugs on the market.
[The same as modeRNA]
Debbie Law, a senior vice president for the multinational pharmaceutical giant, said Agenus’s experimental drug shows “potential for potent anti-tumor activity.”
Also $ee:
"Klaviyo, a marketing technology company based in Boston, said Tuesday it has raised $320 million. The new funding, which comes about six months after a $200 million round in November, doubles the company’s valuation by investors to more than $9 billion. Klaviyo helps businesses do their own marketing without forking over customer data to third-party platforms or marketplaces, said Andrew Białecki, a cofounder and the chief executive of the firm. Klaviyo provides companies with analytics tools to track and understand consumer behavior, while also offering channels for communication such as e-mail or text messaging. “We believe that at the end of the day, owning relationships with consumers will help businesses become closer to their customers, more durable, and more profitable,” Białecki said in a statement, “and that’s not only a better way of doing business — it’s the next era of digital relationships.” The funding round was led by Sands Capital, with participation from new investors including Counterpoint Global, Whale Rock Capital Management, ClearBridge Investments, and Keith Block, the former cochief executive of Salesforce. The company has raised more than $675 million to date....."
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"Glaxo agrees to $2.1 billion cancer-therapy deal with iTeos" by Suzi Ring Bloomberg, June 14, 2021, 4:40 p.m.
GlaxoSmithKline will pay Cambridge-based iTeos Therapeutics as much as $2.1 billion to develop a potential immune therapy as the British drug maker rebuilds its pipeline of cancer drugs.
Glaxo and iTeos agreed to develop and commercialize the monoclonal antibody treatment, which is in early-stage trials against advanced solid tumors, they said in a statement Monday. ITeos will receive an upfront payment of $625 million, with additional milestone payments of up to $1.45 billion.
Shares of iTeos soared as much as 77 percent in trading before US markets opened. It ended the day up 37.29 percent, at $27.50.
Glaxo has been expanding in the lucrative field since Emma Walmsley took over as chief executive in 2017. The company, which had sold its cancer assets to Novartis in 2015, now has three oncology drugs on the market, with the therapy area making up about a quarter of its pipeline. The deal comes a week before a key investor day where Glaxo will detail plans to split in two, spinning off its consumer unit into a separate business.
The companies will also test the monoclonal antibody, known as EOS-448, next year in combination with Glaxo’s cancer drug Jemperli, which was approved in the United States and Europe in April for recurrent or advanced endometrial cancer. Glaxo and iTeos will share any profits from the tie-up in the United States.
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Now for the Flag$hip of Bo$ton:
"Flagship Pioneering raises more cash for new biotech fund; The Cambridge venture capital giant, which spawned Moderna, now has $3.4 billion to spend on startups" by Anissa Gardizy Globe Staff June 14, 2021
As the pandemic was raging in April 2020, Flagship Pioneering raised $1.1 billion for its seventh fund focused on spawning the next wave of biotech startups.
Now, as the world begins to emerge from the pandemic — in part because of the COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna, one of Flagship’s companies — the Cambridge venture capital giant says it has more than tripled that amount.
[Then the drill is over?]
After raising additional funds, Flagship said Monday that it has $3.4 billion to spend on a generation of biotech companies focused on therapeutics, agriculture, and nutrition, and while drug makers typically concentrate on developing treatments for diseases, Flagship is building an internal division that will work on developing medicines for healthy people. These therapies would be intended to protect, maintain, or improve health so a person could better ward off infectious disease threats, as well as “existing pandemic diseases such as obesity, cancer, and neurodegeneration.”
“The pandemic has laid bare the critical nature of health, not only to individuals, but to economies and societies,” said Ara Darzi, who’s heading the initiative, in a press release.
[You $ick f**ks!
HEALTHY PEOPLE DO NOT NEED YOUR "medicine"]
The expanded funding comes as Flagship continues to support its existing companies and launch new ones. The firm poured $370 million into its startups over the last four quarters, and other investors kicked in $4.4 billion.
Flagship has spun out several biotechs over the last year, including Laronde, Generate, Invaio Sciences, and Valo Health, which announced last week that it was pursuing a SPAC merger. And Flagship startups, including Inari Agriculture, Indigo Ag, Tessera Therapeutics, and others, have raised $1.8 billion from private investors in the last year.
Since its founding in 2000, Flagship has created 41 companies.
Now you where a lot of the bailout loot went, too.
Also see:
It's “not a good look for the industry if the person who approved the vaccine went to work for an affiliated company,” but I've been told that the “COVID-19 pandemic brought into stark focus how important it is to bring increased attention and investment to our health security globally, and to preemptive medicine more broadly,” said Noubar Afeyan, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Flagship who also chairs Moderna’s board. Hahn is a radiation oncologist who served as chief medical executive at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston before his appointment to the FDA. He said the pandemic has underscored how vital it is to invest in preventative medicine. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who preceded Hahn as commissioner under Trump, joined the board of New York-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer after leaving the government in 2019. Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine was the first cleared for emergency use by the FDA, on Dec. 11.the sign-off coming a week before Moderna received similar authorization. Earlier this month, Amy Abernethy stepped down as the FDA’s second-in-command to join Verily, the Google spinoff working on health care innovation. Another former FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf, serves as an adviser to Verily. Several government watchdog groups criticized the trend on Tuesday, saying the appointment of former high-ranking FDA officials to leadership positions in biopharma erodes confidence in government regulation of the industry, but.....
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"Innovation economy: Life sciences is poised to be Boston’s dominant industry. Has the area become the Silicon Valley of biotech?" by Scott Kirsner Globe Correspondent, June 15, 2021
The Boston area has long been famous for its elite universities, top tier hospitals, passionate sports fans, and deep history, but over the past year, the biggest buzz has been about biotechnology, from Moderna receiving emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine in December to Biogen winning approval for its Alzheimer’s drug last week.
There has also been a massive amount of investment, acquisitions, public offerings, and laboratory construction during a time when many businesses struggled to keep the lights on. The biotech sector seems poised to emerge from the pandemic as the city’s dominant and most visible industry. Might it finally be time to say that the Boston area has become the Silicon Valley of biotech?
“The concentration of capital, science, and people in Boston has never felt better,” says Bruce Booth of Atlas Venture, an investor who has worked in the city since 2005. Just this week, Flagship Pioneering, the company-creation factory in Cambridge that hatched Moderna, collected a fresh $3.4 billion in capital to keep funding new ventures.
In the stretch since December, you can find six major indications that Boston is the undisputed hub of the life sciences industry, a place where ideas and products that change ― and save ― people’s lives around the world originate.
All three COVID-19 vaccines approved for emergency use in the United States have ties to Boston. Moderna is headquartered in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Much of the research underlying Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine was done at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. And Pfizer has been relying on a production plant in Andover to produce millions of doses of its vaccine for domestic use, and for export to other countries as part of the Biden administration’s donation initiative.
Following approval from the Food and Drug Administration last week, Biogen is shipping the first doses of Aduhelm, its treatment for Alzheimer’s. The decision to approve the drug was contentious, as is its price — $56,000 a year, but no other company has been able to get an Alzheimer’s medicine on the market since 2003, a remarkable achievement for one of the linchpins of the state’s biotech industry.
British pharma giant AstraZeneca is paying $39 billion to acquire Alexion Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded Boston biotech with about 3,800 employees that focuses on rare diseases affecting the kidneys, nervous system, and blood. That deal, expected to close this summer, will create a rare disease division within AstraZeneca that will be based in the Seaport District. Alexion came to town in 2017, relocating from New Haven Conn.
One of Alexion’s neighbors in the Seaport, Ginkgo Bioworks, is planning to go public this year, with a valuation of $15 billion. The company was founded in 2008 by a group of MIT alumni and a professor, Tom Knight. They were interested in building tools to more effectively manipulate DNA. The goal was to insert custom-crafted DNA into living organisms such as yeast or bacteria, to effectively hot-wire them to produce fragrances, chemicals, or key ingredients for animal feed. More recently, biopharma companies, including Moderna, Roche, and Bayer, have come to Ginkgo for its DNA engineering expertise and advanced facilities. Ginkgo added 150 jobs last year — its workforce is now about 500 people — and the company will eventually trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DNA. Ginkgo also will be one of the largest SPAC offerings — the acronym stands for “special purpose acquisition company” — that the life sciences sector has seen.
[Yes, how wonderful!]
Construction of lab and office buildings intended for biotech tenants is zooming ahead. While many white collar industries may continue working remotely, biotech requires expensive gear for designing and testing its products, and the industry strongly believes in the benefits of in-person collaboration. Even Somerville, long considered terra incognita for biotech companies, is getting a 1.3 million-square-foot biotech campus. The first building at the Boynton Yards complex near Union Square will be finished this summer. All this development creates temporary construction jobs and permanent positions at companies, of course, but also boosts the local economy by increasing foot traffic for restaurants, shops, and other businesses.
[I would stay out of that $hithole, and the distancing isn't for them, huh?]
Eyebrow-raising venture capital and private equity activity has gone on unabated. It’s no longer unusual for biotech companies to raise half a billion bucks at the drop of a hat. Cambridge’s ElevateBio, focused on new cell and gene therapies, did it in March, and EQRx, working to develop more affordable cancer drugs, did it in January. All told, a record amount of capital flowed into the biotech sector during the first quarter of 2021: $12 billion, according to research firm PitchBook.
[While you were locked down they were con$tructing the Great Re$et with the loot they stole]
Importantly, these six examples are distinct from each other. “The fact that you can have such diverse significant events in such a short time is indeed perhaps evidence of the vibrancy of the ecosystem,” says Katrine Bosley, an executive who took the Cambridge gene editing startup Editas Medicine public in 2016 and now serves on several boards.
[They kind of talk makes me $ick]
From the outside, the industry can look like an exceptionally well-funded assembly line for pricey new treatments, but it never seems to create all that many jobs, and good luck breaking into the field if you’re coming from another industry. (The Massachusetts Biotech Council pegs industry employment in the state at 79,000, noting that it has added 24,000 jobs in the last decade. Still, that’s less than one Google.), but if the game we’re playing is capitalism — aiming to deliver returns for entrepreneurs, investors who take risks, and shareholders who go along for the ride — biotech is playing it with some laudable goals in mind, such as, keeping you alive (and healthier) longer. That mission has rarely been clearer than now, with vaccines designed or manufactured here diminishing the death toll from COVID-19, and now, maybe add to the list a new sense of tempered optimism for some of the estimated 6 million people suffering from Alzheimer’s in the United States.
[That is an absolutely disgusting paragraph as he advocates for their medical tyranny that is anything but life-saving.
How evil do you have to be to put this out because I am astonishingly appalled by it]
How would we know, quantitatively, that we’ve become the undisputed heavyweight champ of the bio biz? One measure is that while the major pharmaceutical players are sprinkled around the world ― from Tokyo to Manhattan to Basel, Switzerland ― all 10 of the biggest pharma companies have a presence in Boston. Another is that when the trade publication Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News published its annual list of the top US cities for biotech in April, the Boston-Cambridge cluster remained locked into the number one spot it’s held since 2015, when we took it from San Francisco. Massachusetts holds the top spot on other rankings as well, including the Milken Institute’s power rankings of state science and technology sectors.
Biotech investor Otello Stampacchia says the density of the local ecosystem — many key participants know one another and have collaborated over years and multiple jobs — has “contributed to making this a super-charged, faster-paced biotech hub.”
“The industry put its roots in the ground here over 40 years ago, but its growth spurt really began around 20 years ago,” says Michael Gilman, chief executive of Arrakis Therapeutics in Waltham, and a former Biogen research executive. “Since it takes 15 to 20 years to develop a drug, this is about when you’d expect it to flower.”
May it then quickly wilt, by God!
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Time to cash out:
"The inventor of the World Wide Web is looking to cash in on one of the hottest trends in digital artworks. Tim Berners-Lee, who wrote the software underlying the Internet, is selling a computer file containing that original programming code plus a unique encryption signature as a form of collectible known as a nonfungible token, or NFT. The token will be sold at auction by Sotheby’s starting June 23 and running until June 30. Proceeds will benefit initiatives supported by Berners-Lee and his wife, the auction house said. Earlier this year, nonfungible tokens were among the hottest investments in the art world, culminating in March when auction house Christie’s sold an NFT linked to a digital work called “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by the artist Beeple for over $69 million. NFTs, which rely on the same technology underlying digital currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum, have been created and sold, linked to everything from video clips of NBA players dunking to online cartoon cats, though the market has slumped somewhat since the Christie’s sale....."
Keep riding the wave until it cra$hes:
"Circle Internet Financial said it raised an additional $440 million, a huge cash infusion as the Boston company seeks to make it easier to use cryptocurrencies that are not subject to the massive swings in value common with Bitcoin and other leading digital coins. The private investment, announced late last week, comes as Circle has been working since 2018 on what is known as a “stablecoin.” Circle’s product is known as USDC, and it is linked to the price of the US dollar. The company’s funders include Boston’s Fidelity Investments, a longtime backer of cryptocurrency ventures, which earlier this year asked federal regulators for permission to launch a digital currency investment fund....."
Crypto is either a con or has been coopted, imho, because it leads to the digital currency that is part and parcel to the vaccination control program.
"Shares in Waltham med-tech firm PerkinElmer rose 6.85 percent Wednesday to close at $136.57 after the company raised its revenue and earnings guidance for the year. On Tuesday, after the markets closed, PerkinElmer told investors that it now expects revenue of $4.4 billion for the full year, compared to a previous estimate of $4.1 billion for 2021 and compared to $3.8 billion in 2020. Most of the growth is happening in PerkinElmer’s diagnostics business, which includes products used in COVID-19 testing. In that division, revenue in the first quarter rose by more than 200 percent. However, chief financial officer Jamey Mock told investors that revenue associated with non-COVID products will still rise by about 11 percent this year."
