💊 Merck pauses prostate cancer trials; Merck cheers for biliary tract cancer; Seaweed to kill cancer

#263 | Launching new Dimensions; Anti-vaxxers in your mentions; Ants for cancer detections

Hello, and welcome back to join us for a fairly light edition of The Kable today.

A new VC firm has been launched to "digitise life sciences". Launched by alumni from other VCs, the new US-based firm, Dimension, aims to start and back young biotech firms at the "interface of technology and the life sciences" to "transform the trajectory of life on earth" itself, no less. We're surprised they didn't call their firm Bombastic Ventures.

Elsewhere, Merck, who was looking to extend its Keytruda into prostate cancer, had to halt a study well ahead of time after an interim analysis. Fortunately for the company, a separate study evaluating Keytruda in biliary tract cancer had positive data to share.

The US FDA is joining hands with the WHO and others investigating the origins of tainted cough syrups responsible for child deaths in The Gambia, Indonesia, and Uzbekistan.

The death toll from Malawi's ongoing cholera outbreak has now crossed 1,000 even as the health minister asks people to avoid beating up health workers.

"Free speech absolutist" Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and a subsequent withdrawal of policies against Covid misinformation has led to a massive spike in the #diedsuddenly conspiracy theory on the platform. This theory, that blames all manners of deaths on Covid vaccines, is not something we're linking to but a report on it can be found here.

And finally, elsewhere on Twitter, the dark humour continues unabated.

tern @1goodtern

The good news is that there's no evidence that the effects of Covid last longer than 40 months.