February 5, 2010 12:00 AM
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Friday Biotech Funnies: Hitler's Peer Review Angst and Biotech's Id
(MoneyWatch) Who says scientists don't have a sense of humor?
Check out this video on YouTube, in which Hitler's tirade scene from the 2004 film Downfall was hijacked by subtitles about the peer-review process through which scientific research is published in prestigious journals.
Wait, wait -- I know it sounds boring...but wait until Hitler starts pounding the desk and screaming "F@&king reviewer number three! It's always the third g-ddamn reviewer that screws us over! Not a single f@&king one of them has published a high-impact paper in the last five years..." (Hat-tip to Cynthia Robbins-Roth at BioWorld for finding this.)
Another funny biotech forward making the rounds these days is Biotech Blowup. It's a web site in which someone has taken the home pages of various biotech web sites and added banners saying the kinds of things people think but never say out loud -- sort of the "id" of biotech.
So there's The Medicines Co. (MDCO): "Forgetting to file a critical piece of IP that will cost shareholders billions of dollars -- priceless," a reference to the fact that the biotech missed a patent filing deadline for anticoagulant Angiomax (bivalirudin), which could wind up costing something like $850 million in sales and created a scuffle that recently escalated from lobbying efforts to lawsuits.
And there's Talecris (TLCR): "Bailing out private equity since 2007," a reference to the drug maker's massive $950 million initial public offering, which generated $350 million in cash and $864 million in equity for private equity firm Cerberus Partners, which was reeling from bad investments in Chrysler and GMAC.
Keep hitting the refresh button for more -- but note that some of them will repeat before you get to newer ones like Acadia Pharmaceuticals (ACAD): "Pimavanserin will work sooner or later -- the little voices in my head told me so." After a Phase III failure in Parkinson's disease psychosis, just keep telling yourself that...
Check out this video on YouTube, in which Hitler's tirade scene from the 2004 film Downfall was hijacked by subtitles about the peer-review process through which scientific research is published in prestigious journals.
Wait, wait -- I know it sounds boring...but wait until Hitler starts pounding the desk and screaming "F@&king reviewer number three! It's always the third g-ddamn reviewer that screws us over! Not a single f@&king one of them has published a high-impact paper in the last five years..." (Hat-tip to Cynthia Robbins-Roth at BioWorld for finding this.)
Another funny biotech forward making the rounds these days is Biotech Blowup. It's a web site in which someone has taken the home pages of various biotech web sites and added banners saying the kinds of things people think but never say out loud -- sort of the "id" of biotech.
So there's The Medicines Co. (MDCO): "Forgetting to file a critical piece of IP that will cost shareholders billions of dollars -- priceless," a reference to the fact that the biotech missed a patent filing deadline for anticoagulant Angiomax (bivalirudin), which could wind up costing something like $850 million in sales and created a scuffle that recently escalated from lobbying efforts to lawsuits.
And there's Talecris (TLCR): "Bailing out private equity since 2007," a reference to the drug maker's massive $950 million initial public offering, which generated $350 million in cash and $864 million in equity for private equity firm Cerberus Partners, which was reeling from bad investments in Chrysler and GMAC.
Keep hitting the refresh button for more -- but note that some of them will repeat before you get to newer ones like Acadia Pharmaceuticals (ACAD): "Pimavanserin will work sooner or later -- the little voices in my head told me so." After a Phase III failure in Parkinson's disease psychosis, just keep telling yourself that...
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