Blue Chip Companies

Stocks monitoring (September 26, 2020)

BlueChipList.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 20:11:30 +0000

Illumina and Grail CEOs defend their deal to investors

Source: Statnews.com and Matthew Herper’s thread of Twitter.

$8 billion for a company with zero revenue and little scientific data when $ILMN top line is static. At least 5 years away from being anything. AND on top of all that it pisses off all your commercial diagnostic labs that you make the majority of your money from. Yea not smart
$ILMN Retail and buy-side bank pumping this stock, likely to collapse again when Q3 results are released…
Hans Bishop quote sounds a little condescending to the competitors. I think they have a legitimate argument to not be thrilled about this. And then he’s basically saying they aren’t even sophisticated enough to be in the multi-cancer screening business anyway.
What he was saying is that if you are not developing a multi-cancer diagnostic (and only Thrive is) then that problem is completely different from liquid biopsy. It’s a different set of problems.

Who is Hans Bishop

GRAIL Announces Appointment of Hans Bishop as Chief Executive Officer and Strengthens Leadership Team and Board of Directors with New Appointments (June 6, 2019)

“GRAIL is guided by its bold vision to improve cancer survival rates by creating a single blood test that can detect multiple deadly cancer types at one time,” said Mr. Bishop. “For much of my career, I’ve been involved in the fight against cancer, and during that time, I have seen real progress for patients. However, cancer is still the second leading cause of death globally, and I believe early detection is key to changing that. I’m excited to step into the CEO role at a time where the team at GRAIL has delivered such exciting results. I look forward to working with the Board and the entire GRAIL team in this new role to ensure a smooth transition as we advance our test toward commercialization.”
Mr. Bishop has more than 30 years of experience in the biotechnology industry. He will continue to serve as the Executive Chair of the Sana Board of Directors and as a Director of Celgene, Agilent Technologies, and Lyell Immunopharma.
Mr. Bishop founded Juno Therapeutics in 2013 and served as its President and Chief Executive Officer until the company was acquired by Celgene in March 2018. Prior to this, he served as an Executive in Residence at Warburg Pincus. Earlier, he was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Dendreon, Inc. He also previously served as President of Specialty Medicine at Bayer Healthcare, Senior Vice President of Global Commercial Operations at Chiron Corporation, and Vice President and General Manager of European Biopharmaceuticals.
Mr. Bishop holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Brunel University in London.

Grail CEO Hans Bishop Buys $25 Million Atherton Mansion (September 2019)

Married Seattle-based power couple Hans Bishop and Kate James
Until early 2019, he was CEO and President of Juno Therapeutics, guiding the company through its eye-popping $9 billion sale to Celgene. Last year, the exceedingly well-compensated Bishop reportedly scored a $287 million payday on the heels of his company’s massive biotech buyout.

Stocks monitoring (September 21, 2020)

BlueChipList.com — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 20:24:27 +0000

Illumina to buy Grail

WSJ: Sequencing Firm Illumina to Pay $7.1 Billion for Liquid-Biopsy Firm Grail

Simon Barnett (ARK Invest) comments on a insightful long Twitter thread.

What Barnett finds positive about Grail:

GRAIL’s test (Galleri) is being evaluated in some of the largest clinical studies within genomics. Three of these studies are ongoing:
- PATHFINDER (n=6,200; Ends Jan 2022)
- STRIVE (n=99,481; Ends May 2025)
- SUMMIT (n=50,000; Ends Aug 2030)
- These are powerful studies that should drive adoption and payment, but they’re far from generating results.
The version of Galleri commercializing in 2021 is powered by GRAIL’s CCGA (n=15,000) study
In CCGA, Galleri achieved the best, published performance for a multi-cancer early detection liquid biopsy. These are the numbers Illumina referenced this morning.
We think GRAIL’s methylation-based approach is unique and powerful. This approach is low cost and enables detection of early stage disease.
Galleri was awarded a breakthrough device designation, meaning it could take advantage of accelerated FDA review and stable, national reimbursement if (a) CMS finalizes its MCIT pathway and (b) GRAIL pursues and succeeds in MCIT
As part of Illumina, GRAIL may have faster access to Illumina’s existing lab infrastructure and international partners, not to mention the company’s name, brand, and visibility.
GRAIL’s lead in software engineering and methylation-based ML-training is notable.
Altogether, we think GRAIL sits firmly within the vanguard of multi-cancer liquid biopsy screening companies. Its main advantages consist of its large, ongoing clinical studies, methylation-focus, machine learning acumen, and Galleri’s published CCGA performance.
As a part of Illumina, GRAIL could benefit from accelerated access to testing centers, population sequencing efforts, and healthcare systems. However, we think there are numerous open questions and concerns not being widely addressed.

What Barnett finds negative about Grail:

Illumina now will compete with its customers, namely those with existing (or forthcoming) products across several domains like screening, therapy selection, and minimal residual disease monitoring (MRD).
- Though not exhaustive, here’s a list of GRAIL’s comps. Please feel free to suggest others:
- Screening: Thrive Earlier Detection, Freenome, Exact Sciences, Guardant Health (GH)
- Rx Optimization: Invitae (NVTA), Natera (NTRA), GH, Veracyte, Tempus, Roche
- MRD: NVTA, NTRA, GH, Roche
In our view, these companies (collectively, and individually in many cases), are much better positioned to launch clinical diagnostics. Why?
The expertise/experience to launch successful diagnostic offerings, we think, is outside of Illumina’s wheelhouse.
Leading medical oncology companies typically have broad domain expertise and/or vertical integration across: regulatory, payor integration, pre/post-test education, biopharma/companion diagnostic partnerships, medical reporting, billing & claims, lab information management (LIMS), high-throughput lab automation, quality control, clinical decision support tools, etc.
We think these domains are outside of Illumina’s and GRAIL’s current expertise. Building this infrastructure is expensive and time consuming.
Moreover, we are not encouraged by Illumina’s previous attempts at clinical market penetration, namely NIPT and IVD-based oncology products (TruSeq), which are simpler than screening.
Instead, it seems these markets are consolidating to pure-play diagnostic companies.
Illumina explained its choice to compete w/ customers because (a) the screening TAM is large ($75B+) and (b) it feels Galleri is unique and differentiated.
We think the TAM could be even larger if younger, high-risk cohorts are selectively screened and prices are low. https://t.co/hGrZPDR5hy

What Barnett thinks about Galleri:

Galleri’s ability to reliably analyze methylation, its sole input, was enabled by Twist Biosciences’ (TWST) methylation capture panel. Since any test provider can buy Twist panels, it levels the playing field.
Let’s revisit the data, specifically the CCGA study, starting with the study’s design.
CCGA was observational, meaning no treatment was altered by the results of the test. This limits our understanding of the ‘real-world’ effects of such a test.
Moreover, the final validation cohort (n=1,264), which yielded the performance #’s referenced on today’s call, had a ~52% incidence rate of cancer. This means 52% of those 1,264 had cancer.
In reality, only 1.3% of persons aged 50+ are diagnosed with cancer annually.
This makes me wonder if indeed the results are generalizable to the intended use population. You could argue that this is a necessary evil for a cash-strapped startup needing a cancer-enriched cohort for ML training.
However, Thrive Earlier Detection’s recent Detect-A study (n=10,000) (which WAS interventional and had a specificity of 99%) wasn’t enriched for the presence of cancer. This test also isn’t methylation-based.
GRAIL’s test (and commercial efforts) also focus on its tissue-of-origin classifier, which ostensibly enables a doctor to know where a cancer is growing in the body with a 93% accuracy rate. Here’s where I really take issue:
GRAIL isn’t included false positives in the 93%.
Let’s do some math to make this point:
- In a representative population of 1,000,000 people w/ a cancer incidence rate of 1.28% AND using GRAIL’s performance data, we get the following results (see below).
- With a 44% sensitivity, more of my test-positives will be false than true. https://t.co/MEDqYxXie0
- Obviously, tissue-of-origin will be wrong for false positives, which may be why they only included true test-positives in the calculation. If we include false positives, the tissue-of-origin readout only will be correct ~42% of the time, not ~93%.
- My concern is that a predictive power this low (unless I’m doing my math wrong, which I’m happy to be critiqued on), could be problematic at scale. It seems more likely physicians would flex to a full body PET-CT instead of trusting the TOO readout based on this?
Wrapping up, we’re also concerned about Illumina’s divesting and reinvesting in GRAIL, especially as it relates to foresight into the industry. We also think the R&D requirements for GRAIL will be significantly more than laid out and that revenue may take longer to ramp.
For example, PATHFINDER uses hereditary cancer risk as inclusion criteria. GRAIL doesn’t have this expertise. Will it be harder for them to partner now with an existing vendor? Will they need to develop their own germline workflow? Will they settle for ‘vanilla’ germline seq?
In conclusion, there’s a LOT to consider here. There are positives and negatives and my thoughts here aren’t exhaustive. I’d love to hear/get community feedback.

Stocks monitoring (September 11, 2020)

BlueChipList.com — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 20:59:39 +0000

Unity experiments with new IPO process

Unity, which sells software to create video games, is trying out a new bidding process for a public listing later this month, adding to the growing number of companies seeking alternatives to the traditional IPO.
Prospective institutional investors will be asked how many shares they wish to buy, and at what price, by an online system managed by Goldman Sachs, according to a notice sent out to explain the new process. Investors can place multiple bids at difference prices.
Unity will select a price for the offering after the bids are entered, allocating a portion of the shares to all investors who indicated interest above that price level, according to the notice, which was viewed by the Financial Times.

Docusign

Chris Perruna on Twitter @cperruna

$DOCU is a textbook example of what you look for in a big winner.

Great new product or service
Increasing Sales
Increasing Earnings
Increasing Institutional Sponsorship
Increasing Price & Volume

It has had it all – it’s all related with this one.

Fastly -7% today

CMLviz reports and shares Fool.com analysis.

The content delivery network’s largest customer may soon be forced to shut down its American operations, taking a large bite out of Fastly’s revenue stream.
The content delivery network specialist counts Chinese social media network TikTok as its largest customer, and that revenue stream will dry up unless TikTok owner ByteDance finds a buyer for the American part of the service before Sept. 15.
TikTok was reportedly close to announcing a winner between Microsoft and Oracle in August, but the Chinese government stepped in with new export regulations that would require government approval of any deal.

Amazon Advertising & Twitch

Amazon Opens Twitch’s Ad Inventory to Programmatic Buyers.

Twitch inventory is now available on the Amazon Advertising platform, meaning media buyers can now purchase ads programmatically on the esports streaming site.

Previously, advertisers had to undergo a more manual process of purchasing ads on the streaming site, which attracts an average of 17.5 million daily viewers, but as of earlier this week, Twitch audiences are available for inclusion in Amazon Advertising campaigns.

Stocks monitoring (September 10, 2020)

BlueChipList.com — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 21:06:59 +0000

Fastly and Google Cloud

Fastly, Inc. (FSLY) Offers First Partner Edge Cloud-Based Content Delivery Solution on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Under a single billing arrangement and using Google Cloud committed spend, Google Cloud customers can now purchase Fastly – the first partner edge cloud-based content delivery solution to be offered within the Google Cloud Marketplace – as a part of their modern tech stack.

Grail IPO

Ophir Gottlieb on Grail IPO on Twitter:

Looks like a strong competitor to NVTA.
GRAIL is poised to detect cancer early by combining high-intensity sequencing of unprecedented depth with the techniques of modern data science. Genomic medicine, GRAIL is creating vast datasets to develop evidence supporting our products

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-backed cancer detection company Grail, led by ex-Juno CEO, files for IPO.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-backed cancer detection company Grail, led by ex-Juno CEO, files for IPO
Grail does not have revenue or a commercially-available product. That reflects the traditional life cycle of biotech companies, which commonly invest in research and development for years before bringing products to market. It reported a $136.4 million loss in the first half of this year, up from $117.2 million a year ago.
In its IPO filing, Grail said its multi-cancer early detection test, Galleri, will commercially launch in 2021 as a laboratory-developed test. It said the test “can lead to a dramatic increase in early cancer diagnosis.”

Xero Limited