💊 SK bioscience launches a tech transfer model for vaccines; A Lilly boost for LMIC cold chains; Happy Neglected Tropical Diseases Day, everyone

#265 | People over profits? Hehehe; A disease outbreak database sees the light of day; Pollution leads kids astray

Hello, and welcome back to a brand new week with The Kable.

Layoffs continue to roil the biopharma space, with Amgen laying off 300 people, mainly in the US. What especially galls our little socialist minds is how these layoffs are coming a mere month after Amgen SHELLED OUT $28.7 BILLION to acquire Horizon Therapeutics.

Pharma employees in the US have no succour to find at Pfizer either; the company is saying so long to people at two locations in California and Connecticut. This is marginally understandable. It's not as if Pfizer raked in billions in Covid therapeutics. Nor does it have any potential blockbusters in waiting for, say, RSV and, oh maybe, Lyme disease. Nor has Pfizer completed a couple of large acquisitions in the last quarter or launched a new company. Here's hoping the money Pfizer saved by saying buh-bye to the few people it did gives it the runway to last till the end of the year.

Bucking the layoff trend a bit is Moderna, which instead has decided to hire 2000 people.

BioPharmaDive takes a fascinating look at what happens when a monopoly falls off a patent cliff as is happening with AbbVie's Humira in the US next month.

A movie review in The Kable? Well, this one fits. You may or may not have heard of a recent Hollywood release called M3gan, which is about an AI-powered personal assistant. Let us just say the future may not necessarily be the bed of roses we're expecting.

The WHO has kicked off its Neglected Tropical Diseases campaign. NTDs affect more than a billion people around the world every year. If you're still wondering why these diseases are neglected, take a guess at which regions of the world they affect the most. 

And finally, a mining company in Australia says sorry... because it lost a radioactive device containing Caesium-137 somewhere within a 1,400-kilometre span. Good news, unlike most things Australian, this capsule-sized device won't kill you. It will only give you radiation burns or sickness.