An­oth­er Ra­maswamy stunt plays well on Wall Street, Mar­tin Shkre­li on shame, and more

End­points as­sess­es the big bio­phar­ma R&D sto­ries of the week, with a lit­tle added com­men­tary on what they mean for the in­dus­try.

Ra­maswamy strikes biotech gold, again, with trade­mark IPO stunt

Last year’s big IPO for Ax­o­vant $AX­ON from Vivek Ra­maswamy nev­er made any sense in my opin­ion. If you reach in­to the fail­ure buck­et and pluck out an as­set for cheap, it didn’t make sense that in­vestors would buy in and sup­port it through a late-stage pro­gram. The risk/re­ward equa­tion was out of whack, and the whole thing reeked of an end-of-days play for the biotech bub­ble. Ra­maswamy, though, just pulled off an­oth­er record IPO af­ter whip­ping up a new com­pa­ny overnight, bring­ing in a cou­ple of high-pro­file play­ers to front the small team and tout­ing a trendy fo­cus on women’s health. The bub­ble, such as it was, is long popped. So I have to take my hat off to Ra­maswamy. He may know lit­tle about ac­tu­al drug de­vel­op­ment, but there’s no bet­ter fi­nan­cial en­gi­neer in biotech. Fi­nan­cial en­gi­neer­ing, though, goes just so far in biotech. In­evitably, da­ta will de­cide these com­pa­nies’ fate. And I’ll be wait­ing for that.

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