Shares ofAvidity Biosciences(RNA) surged to a record high Wednesday after the company showed its hand in the cardiovascular space — a first for the company's RNA platform.
This has the potential to be "game-changing," Chief ExecutiveSarah Boyce told Investor's Business Dailyin a recent interview. Under its partnership withBristol Myers Squibb(BMY), Avidity plans to test out treatments for two rare diseases, PLN cardiomyopathy and PRKAG2 syndrome.
Both diseases are driven by genetic causes. In laboratory testing, Avidity's drugs lowered the amount of disease-causing protein in the heart by about 80%.
Generally, cardiologists don't study the genetics of their patients.
"We are proud to be the first company to successfully deliver siRNA (small interfering RNA) directly to skeletal muscle and now, we have demonstrated that we can deliver siRNA against targets in the heart in preclinical studies," Boyce said in a written statement.
In early action, Avidity Biosciences stock rocketed more than 15% to 54.05. Shares trounced their previous record high at 50.76.
Avidity Biosciences Enters Cardio Space
There are no approved treatments for PLN cardiomyopathy or PRKAG2 syndrome. They are caused by mutations in the PLN and PRKAG2 genes, respectively. The former causes dilation of the heart chambers, sudden cardiac death and heart failure. The latter leads to thickening of the heart muscle, irregular heartbeats and other problems.
So far, Avidity Biosciences has tested its treatments in nonhuman primates.
"However, it is important to note the small sample of NHP data presented, and, as yet, no data presented from a disease model," Chardan analyst Keay Nakae said in a report. "A major feature of both diseases is the physiological changes that occur in the heart, and it is yet to be determined if either of these therapies will lead to a functional reversal of those changes."
Still, the move is unique for the RNA space. These drugs try to silence the genes responsible for making disease-causing proteins. Biotech companies first focused on delivering RNA-targeting drugs to the liver. Now, they're expanding into other tissue types.
Avidity Biosciences ultimately plans to test 10 cardiovascular targets with partner Bristol.
Russia’s ban on propaganda promoting a ‘childless lifestyle’ across all forms of media has passed the State Duma in a bid to address the country’s “catastrophic” demographic decline.
The ban covers anti-natalist messaging in movies, television, advertising and social media, and will hand out fines up to €4,000 euros, with civil servants facing double the punishment if they violate the new law.
“Everything needs to be done to make sure that new generations of Russians grow up with a focus on traditional family values,” said Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin after the law was rubber stamped in the lower house of the Russian parliament.
The legislation also restricts the international adoption of Russian children in countries where transgender ideology is dominant, prohibiting them from being adopted by parents who live in places where gender reassignment via medical surgery or changing official documents is legal.
“It is extremely important to prevent any encroachment on the possible change of gender by any means in case of adoptions to other countries,” said Volodin.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov previously described Russia’s demographic peril as a “catastrophic” situation that must be tackled at the highest level of government.
Russia’s birth rate currently stands at just 1.49, well below the 2.1 per woman replacement rate.
Analysis by the Atlantic Council predicted Russia’s population could halve by 2100, with the UN forecasting a 17 per cent drop over the next 50 years.
Russia’s birth rate is currently at its lowest in a quarter of a century, a situation that has been exacerbated by mounting fatalities as a result of the war with Ukraine.
Unlike Russia, western European countries have chosen to embrace mass migration to address their demographic decline, while openly encouraging the native population to have fewer children in the name of solving ‘climate change’.
Legacy media outlets continually promote the benefits of avoiding children, scaring women that they’ll lose their ‘freedom’ and encouraging males to live as man-babies in a state of permanent adolescence.
This culminated earlier this year when Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker faced a sustained backlash for daring to suggest that women should aspire to be mothers and homemakers.
There’s a great moment in Mad Max: Fury Road where they roll up to a naked woman chained to a tower and Max utters one of his, like, fourteen lines in the movie, “That’s bait.”
This is a metaphor for literally the entire media landscape in the age of social media.
Since Trump’s victory last Tuesday the Usual Suspects have chummed the waters with every possible bad idea to dishearten and undermine that victory. It’s all bait.
We weren’t 24 hours removed from Kamala Harris’ concession speech, a carbon copy of the one Hillary Clinton gave in 2016, where she said, “Fight” 20 times, before the first big piece of red meat was thrown down in front of libertarians to virtue signal over… Ending the Fed.
FOMC Chair Jerome Powell was forced to field a question during the post-meeting presser about stepping down if asked to by President-Elect Trump.
Powell “closed the fucking door” on that with one word, “No.”
At which point everyone was shocked, shocked I say!, to find out that the Fed Chair cannot be removed because the President didn’t like him. The same goes for Supreme Court justices, for example. This is politics folks, not philosophy. I’m not endorsing this situation but I am pointing out that those who have been parroting “End the Fed” since Ron Paul ran in 2008 should have known this.
So, given this background, one has to conclude it’s the dirtiest of dirty politics designed to create divisions within the MAGA crowd at a time when we should be coming together on the right issues, staffing the new administration, discussing which departments to cut, how to finance the debt.
In other words, we should be setting the tempo, rather than responding to it by those most vulnerable to a US government and Federal Reserve in lock-step to defend US sovereignty.
For more than a year I told you there would be two big targets for the Democrats in this election cycle, Jerome Powell and Elon Musk.
Powell is Public Enemy #1 over his aggressively tight monetary policy which all Austrians should be rejoicing over rather than concocting ever more lurid arguments about ‘stealth QE.’ For systemic thinkers, having a one-level flow chart on something as important and germane as monetary policy is, frankly, a pretty lazy and pathetic look.
Musk has now challenged Powell for the top spot for exclusion from Davos’ Happy Holidays Card List because of how Twitter and Starlink have thrown sand in the gears of their narrative generation engine, as I wrote about last week.
Going back to Powell, since the March 2023 banking crisis, which he fomented for political reasons and raised interest rates in the middle of, just to make sure everyone who mattered got the fucking memo, I eventually stopped being sick of Elizabeth Warren’s HR nanny routine from atop the Senate Banking Committee and simply started laughing at her.
She issued stern letters demanding the Fed lower interest rates at seemingly every FOMC meeting, trying to gin up controversy over the Fed. And it wasn’t to give anyone relief, or for the children, it was to help Democrats win the election and loosen the death grip Powell’s ‘higher for longer’ policy had on European capital markets.
But thanks to this silly question by a junior staffer at Politico, now the ‘Woke Left’ and the ‘Woke Right’ are having their fee-fees stroked by the remnants of the old banking cartels they both believe they are fighting here.
If it wasn’t so gods-damned important I’d be chuckling in Collapsitarian.
A Buffett at the Waffle House
Next up was the bait thrown at trad conservatives over people like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. The biggest tell that Trump was likely to win in a landslide was the intelligence blob floating the rumor weeks ago that Trump still liked Pompeo and that Big Mike was sniffing around as either Secretary of State or Defense.
That’s chum, folks. And Trump put the hammer down on it after a couple of days letting it percolate. He should have quashed it sooner. But, who am I to give the Master of the Overton Window advice on such matters?
Haley was also a non-starter. He hates her. Her career now starts and ends every day with, “More Coffee?” and “Scattered, Smothered, and Chunked? Got it, hunny.”
In fact, you know Trump hates Marco Rubio as much as he does Haley because I believe the rumor about him becoming Secretary of State.
How else are you going to get RINO “Little Marco” and his really big Manila Envelope Quotient (MEQ) out of the Senate and replaced by someone who will actually work with Trump, rather than against him on the big legislation that needs to get passed in 2025?
Promote him, keep him on a short leash about reforming Foggy Bottom, and let him grandstand on CHY-Na. And if he doesn’t do what’s asked of him? “You’re Fired!”
And if I’m wrong and Rubio is just more Neocon bait, then Masal Tov! Oi vey.
That rumor about Mike Rogers to head the CIA and everything else you’ve seen… all bait. All lame attempts to flood the zone with bad information and drive wedges between Trump’s biggest supporters and him.
If you can’t pick up on crude attempts at British divide and rule at this stage of the game, maybe you just suck at the game.
It took the leaking of a secret ballot organized by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to finally wake people up to the depths to which the bureaucratic immune system is fighting back against the chemotherapy Trump’s win represents.
If Marjorie Taylor Greene helps stop John Cornyn from becoming our leader in the Senate, I’ll take back most of the mean things I’ve said about her.
Most of them.
Schadenfreude in Berlin
Trump’s win caused a political earthquake in Berlin as the German government collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz tried to meet a cash call to his creditors on Ukraine. FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner refused to approve another 6 billion euros to Ukraine. But Germany is out of money this fiscal year and it needed to go to the Bundestag. So Scholz fired him and Lindner pulled the FDP out of the coalition.
Now the situation in Germany is in the kind of flux we usually only see in places being color revolution’d.
They are so desperate to hold onto power we’re now being regaled with the latest fantasy of the “Saxony Separatists,” all 3 of them, as the latest reason to ban Alternative for Germany (AfD) and keep them from participating in the upcoming snap elections.
Again, that’s bait for the German Boomers. Even if the ban doesn’t work, it will knock a couple of points off AfD’s national totals. But, they are just doing tactical retreats here. It’s not winning, it’s more trying to not lose immediately.
Because the cultural and demographic shift against this globalist insanity has already occurred.
We’re watching the old political order in Germany, held together previously by the iron fist of Angela “Stasi” Merkel, come apart at the seams. The idea that Germans would simply vote themselves out of existence because of their collective guilt was never really a starter.
At some point the German industrialist class would make their presence felt. Trump’s victory likely catalyzed this.
Davos’ whole project depended on using the generational imprint of everyone post-WWII to manufacture political realities at odds with the self-interests of those people. But that puts a time limit on the project. It had to happen before the generations that fought WWII and grew up in the rebuilding phase died off.
For example, for Germans it was their collective shame over Hitler. For Japan, it was the shame of being bombed by the Americans. For America it was stoking our self-reliance into self-righteousness.
As Howard Lutnick pointed out on CNBC a few months ago, we rebuilt these people through our dominance and allowing them to put tariffs on our goods to regenerate their local economies. Those tariffs are still in place and it’s time to remove them by negotiating much better deals for everyone.
But the demographic shift has happened. We saw it in the state elections in Germany this September, where AfD saw huge gains among the 18-29 year olds. The same thing has been happening in Greece in the aftermath of the German/EU strip-mining of the country after their multiple sovereign debt crises.
In the US the kids are moving away from the libertine Boomers. Even the Millennials are finally fulfilling their desires for authenticity, after now surviving three national bankruptcies during their lifetimes — Y2K, Lehman Bros. and COVID-19.
This allowed for Gen-X to finally come into their own and deliver the result the world needed.
So, please folks. Take the wins. Jack out of the Twitter spew for a few days. They want you anxious and afraid. It’s all they have left. Because we just told them we don’t want what they are offering or need what they’ve sold us.
Trust in the result you delivered just a little. This isn’t the same story as 2016.
Trust in media has not only collapsed, it’s now reached its terminal phase. We just broke The Wire, why on earth would we want to repair it by giving their crudity credibility?
In an effort to shield California from anticipated major policy changes from the incoming Trump administration, Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Washington this week to discuss zero-emissions policy and disaster relief with Biden administration officials.
Newsom also met with the California Democratic congressional delegation.
The governor is seeking federal approval for his state’s climate regulations, which he anticipates will be threatened under President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration. Newsom is also aiming for a $5.2 billion reimbursement for emergency COVID-19 funding and updates to the state’s Medicaid program.
Newsom’s press secretary Izzy Gardon told NTD in a statement that “the Governor will advocate for key priorities that advance the health and well-being of all Californians,” and that they are “building on the progress made since President Biden took office.”
Newsom is trying to move as quickly as he can before Democrats no longer control the executive branch after Jan. 20. He traveled to the nation’s capital on Monday and will be returning to Sacramento on Wednesday.
Following Trump’s victory last week over Vice President Kamala Harris, Newsom ordered an emergency special session of the California state legislature to begin Dec. 2, a move which, according to his X account, is intended “to safeguard the fundamental freedoms we all hold dear.”
California Assemblyman James Gallagher, the Republican Minority Leader in the state’s lower house, is critical of Newsom’s Washington trip, saying he thinks that the governor should be working to improve the state instead of seeking help from what he views as a failed federal administration.
“It would be nice if Newsom focused on improving things for Californians instead of doubling down on the same failed policies that cost Harris the election,” Gallagher told NTD News in a text message.
Commenting on Newsom’s responses to his election victory, Trump wrote on Nov. 8 on Truth Social that the governor was “stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again.’”
Despite losing the Golden State to Harris, Trump earned 38 percent of the vote in the state this time around, his highest total in the state out of three presidential contests.
Harris, who will be out of public office for the first time in decades come January, is a potential candidate to succeed Newsom, who is term-limited and will not be eligible for reelection when the next gubernatorial election is held in 2026. She was formerly the state’s attorney general and served as its junior U.S. Senator before she became Biden’s running mate in 2020.
If Harris decides to run, it would not be the first time a former vice president ran for California governor after losing a presidential election.
Then-Vice President Richard Nixon lost the 1962 race for California governor just 2 years after he was defeated by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. Nixon went on to mount a historic political comeback by winning the presidency in 1968. He was reelected in 1972, winning 49 out of 50 states.
Nixon resigned before his second term was finished, after his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill signaled that they would no longer support him when it became apparent that his administration covered up illegal activity related to the infamous Watergate break-in.
Nearly a month ago highly classifiedUS intelligence detailingIsraeli plans for a retaliation attack against Iran appeared online. The pair of documents were prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the leak immediately kicked off a massive federal investigation and hunt for the leaker.
On Wednesday federal prosecutors have revealed an arrest, with the NY Times reporting that "The man, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information." He had worked for the US government overseas, and is being charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act. The Times has followed with an update identifying him as a CIA official.
Rahman was apprehended by the FBI in Cambodia on Tuesday, and has been brought to federal court in Guam where he'll get charged in the case.
"Court documents said Mr. Rahman held a top secret security clearance with access to sensitive compartmentalized information, which is typical for many C.I.A. employees who handle classified materials.," the Times continues.
It also remains unclear what he was doing in Cambodia at the time of this arrest - whether on the run or perhaps merely traveling abroad, or possibly for work.
The FBI previously said it was "working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and intelligence community" to track down the leaker. From the start, federal investigators made clear that they believed it to be the result of an intelligence insider, and not the result of a foreign hacking operation.
More than a week after the leaks first appeared Israeli media indicated that national decision-makers had delayed the timing of the planned retaliatory attack on Iran due to the leak incident, given one of the docs detailed Israeli placements and movements of missiles and defensive assets.
"Israel is concerned the leak could help Iran predict certain patterns of attack," The Times had written. "It has been forced to develop an alternative plan, one that requires detailed war gaming before any order is given, The Times understands."
"The leak of the American documents delayed the attack due to the need to change certain strategies and components," an intelligence source described as having knowledge of Israeli deliberations said.
Additionally there appeared in the leaks confirmation of Israel's highly secretive nuclear weapons program, which on an official level it is not supposed to have.
The pair of documents were classified TOP SECRET, with both marked NOFORN - which is among the highest classifications - given it indicates the specific intelligence cannot be shared with allied foreign intelligence agencies. But markings indicated they could be shared only among "Five Eyes" allies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The investigation to find the leaker focused heavily on these Five Eyes allies, but the NY Times report is saying that the leak occurred in-house, via a US government employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Plan to announce initial clinical data for XMT-1660 at a company event by the end of 2024
Dose escalation advancing in Phase 1 clinical trial of XMT-2056
Conference call today at 8:00 a.m. ET
Mersana will host a conference call today at 8:00 a.m. ET to discuss business updates and its financial results for the third quarter of 2024. To access the call, please dial 833-255-2826 (domestic) or 412-317-0689 (international). A live webcast of the presentation will be available on the Investors & Media section of the Mersana website at www.mersana.com, and a replay of the webcast will be available in the same location following the conference call for approximately 90 days.
Merger to create a Nasdaq-listed company focusing on targeted protein degradation technology with
three degrader programs in or about to initiate Phase 1 clinical trials – two for the treatment of cancer and one for the treatment of acute and chronic pain
Combined company expected to have approximately $65 million of cash and cash equivalents at close to provide funding through multiple clinical milestones and expected runway through 2026
As part of merger agreement, Pulmatrix intends to divest its assets including its acute migraine candidate, PUR3100, and other development candidates based on its iSPERSE™ technology
Cullgen and Pulmatrix will host an informational webcast about the proposed merger that will be made available to access at 12:00 pm ET today
Webcast Information
Management will host an informational webcast that will be made available to access at 12:00 pm ET today. A link to the webcast can be found in the Investor Events and Presentations section of the Pulmatrix website at www.pulmatrix.com and in the News & Events section of Cullgen's website at www.cullgen.com.
