Happy New Year!

I have not been overly diligent about posting but many of my creative juices are going into actual projects. I wish you all a happy New Year, and stay tuned perhaps the I will find my inspiration.

Renewable work

Everyone always talks about renewable energy, but it is important to remember that energy is just we use to do work. At every step from making the solar panels or fiberglass for a wind turbine, to transmitting the energy to using the energy to do work there is a loss of efficiency. This loss of efficiency translates to heat, and the bigger the city the more energy and therefore heat is released. Instead of investing solely in renewable energy we should invest in renewable sources of work.  One of the biggest uses of energy is air conditioners. More interestingly air conditioners dump huge amounts of heat outdoors, and in some cases the use of air conditioners actually raises the outdoor temperature.

(Seriously Google it.)

My thought for renewable work is designing absorption air conditioning to work on either the low level heat from solar collectors that would heat water for homes or on a larger scale using reflectors or Fresnel lenses. With lots of these systems picking up the load from electrical ACs a real impact could be made. Using solar absorption AC during the heat of the day the system would work the hardest, and any additional capacity could be used to make ice or chilled brine to carry the building through the night. Yes, this system is still moving heat from inside to outside but much of the actual work being done, is done with heat that was already there. Additionally since there is no conversion of solar energy to direct current, alternating current to work the possible efficiency is higher than other renewable sources of work.

Acetaminophen linked to ADHD is autism next?

While I think there are alternate explanations for the link between acetaminophen and ADHD, the information is out there. I imagine that a link between acetaminophen and autism is next, either in utero or during early childhood, since ADHD is an autism spectrum disorder. The parents groups will demand black box warning, and flog the companies and the FDA, but since acetaminophen is in everything and is perceived as safer for children, it is going to be hard find a replacement for pain and fever relief in kids

If you are a lawyer, this could be an opportunity for the kind of class action that buys the lawyers beach houses in Maui, next to Oprah.

A possible opportunity for private equity investment

If you follow biotech and pharma you know that in recent months the FDA has rejected several high profile drugs. These were late or later stage drugs for some very profitable indications, with reasonable amounts of life left on the patents. The reason for the rejections were for side effects that were highly unpleasant or lethal, but very rare, or the drug worked really well but only for certain people. These are necessarily insurmountable problems; given the ever decreasing cost of DNA sequencing it will soon be possible to find variants and or other biomarkers to predict who should get the drug with enough certainty for the FDA to approve the drug and for CMS to pay for the companion diagnostic. You might be thinking this is old news, and you are right, I’ll been chatting with people about doing this for 5-6 years.

The difference is right now we are in the sweet spot for this type of activity, since the necessary sequencing technologies needed aren’t ready yet but should be there soon, so the investors will only have to sit on the IP for a year or two. This means it is not yet prohibitively expense for a fund to pick up the rights to a few late stage failed drugs or biologicals for 10-25 cents on the dollar. Then in the 2015-16 timeframe hire CROs or academic labs to figure out the companion diagnostic for predicting who should or shouldn’t get the drug and bring the drug to market in the 2018 timeframe (this assumes you have the ability to market and distribute the drug without eating up the profits.) Less risky but also potentially less profitable would be to develop the companion diagnostic and selling it and rights to the drug either back or to a third party, and letting them bring the drug and companion diagnostic to market. However, the window is closing since once the sequencing technologies are mature enough to actually be useful the drug companies themselves will do this, or hire special CROs to salvage drugs. If you are reading this a couple years from now, and think this seems similar to something you read in Forbes/WSJ or saw on TV, then it is way too late. (Hopefully by then we’ll start with the diagnostic and make the drug.)

If you like the idea and have tens of millions of dollars you are looking to turn into hundreds of millions dollars, I am available do drop me a line

If you have a few million dollars you want to turn into tens of millions you could partner with an information company like (Lexis Nexis, Elsevier, etc) to do the research to find really good drugs that failed in the late stages and are off patent, and develop the companion diagnostic and bring the drug to market by leveraging the old safety with a small clinical trial. Since there is no patent protection the business model is to license the diagnostic to generic companies to do the actual manufacture and distribution.

Salvage Pharmaceuticals or Second Chance Pharmaceuticals would be good names.