The NFTBC Digest [Free Post]
News, Links, Marginalia and other Curiosities
Friends of NFTBC.
It occurred to me that, from week-to-week, there is all manner of news, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I don’t share with you. If I was a paying NFTBC subscriber with an interest in one or more NFTBC stocks, I think I’d be interested in seeing it. So this is what the new NFTBC Digest is all about.
I have no desire to hit you with extra text you’re not going to read (I wouldn’t want that either). My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. That’s it.
It will be a sort of pilot project to begin with so that I can iterate and see how it evolves. What I want is for the Digest to be useful for you and to remain that way. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but I could also envisage there being fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.
This first one is a free post.
Regeneron
It’s been a long time coming but Regeneron issued highly positive Phase III results for garetosmab in Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, a serious rare disease with major unmet need. If things had worked out a bit differently, this medicine might have been on the market for a few years already - Regeneron had been pursuing a potentially pivotal phase II trial but a patient death (ultimately determined to be unrelated) led to further testing and a phase III.
Just the previous week Regeneron issued highly positive phase III results for its cat and birch allergy antibody cocktails, although unlike garetosmab there will need to be further confirmatory trials.
So I did a tweet:
As many of you already know, the essence of the Regeneron investment thesis lies in the company’s high clinical trial success rates. The evidence is out there for anyone who wants to look at it, so it somewhat surprised me how much interest the tweet received - but it’s nice that it did.
Regeneron has done a number of sell-side conferences in the last few weeks. The Morgan Stanley one was the standout and worth reading if you haven’t yet (transcript here). Notably Len Schleifer spoke with his typical candour and also reeled off a list of potential blockbuster drugs under development - which, by the way, included the cat and birch allergy programs.
There’s anoter conference this coming week (24 September): Bernstein Insights: Healthcare Leaders and Disruptors - 2nd Annual Healthcare Forum
I enjoyed this short podcast from RGC, with Mammoth Biosciences. You get an overview of next-gen CRISPR therapies and insight into why Regeneron and Mammoth Biosciences are a good match for their broad partnership. Mammoth does ultracompact nucleases but not delivery. Regeneron does next-gen targeted delivery, but is size constrained. The Mammoth partnership seems very under the radar currently, but I suspect we’ll be hearing more about it in the years ahead.
Bruker
According to an analysis by STAT, there was a $8.1bn surge in awarded NIH grants in August, and the NIH now seems on track to spend its entire budget by the 30 September deadline:
Bear in mind that only at the beginning of August Bruker had been anticipating NIH funding to be down 20-25% this year!
BMW
This article in AutoNews Europe, talks about BMW and Audi and their different approaches - BMW is maintaining a broad lineup while Audi is going more focussed. What drew me in were some words from Jochen Goller (BMW head of sales, and member of the management board):
Complexity should not be the reason for reducing your product portfolio. Managing complexity can also be a competitive advantage.
Managing complexity was a central element of Part III of my deep dive - BMW is unusually good at it, so much so that it really is a competitive advantage in the context of an incredibly complex industry. It’s interesting to hear it straight from management.
Tangentially, Audi began taking orders in China this week for its new “AUDI” sub-brand. New branding (no traditional Audi logo), budget price, built on a Chinese platform - the “AUDI” E5 has no resemblance to anything else produced by the group. Perhaps it will work as I strategy - I offer no predictions. I’m merely highlighting it here as a curiosity and as an example of exactly the sort of thing BMW would never do given the various risks it surely brings to premium brand equity cultivated over decades.
See for yourself the upcoming iX3 in production at the new high-tech Debrecen plant in Hungary:
WPP
I like to dip into The Immortal Life of Agencies podcast from time to time. I listened to this episode with Matt McNeany a few months ago. He’s an adtech founder and a 20 year veteran of Omnicom, where he was most recently Chief Transformation Officer. He talks about AI and what it means for agencies today, which is why I listened to it. It’s a good episode. McNeany also mentioned that he was between jobs, but then turned up in August as President at WPP Open (WPP’s AI-powered ‘marketing operating system’) - which of itself is a curiosity. The nature of his precise venture at WPP is yet to be announced.
Anyhoo… the reason I’m writing about this is because new WPP CEO, Cindy Rose, did her first town recently, which of itself isn’t particularly interesting because it wasn’t public. But McNeany’s posting about it caught my eye:
This is why I bother continuing to think about WPP - absolutely no one is expecting WPP Open to amount to anything. In theory, WPP Open has the potential to be quite disruptive - I believe . But we’ll just have to wait and see how it works out in practise. In the meantime I shall continue watching.
That’s it for the first edition of The Digest. As always, get in touch if you have any comments or questions.