Weekend Update #057

Jan 14

Welcome to Blue Room's Weekend Update. Each week, we're sharing what companies we're researching and the what, the who and the how that we think makes the companies interesting and unique. This roundup is brought to you weekly by a group of interns, creative minds, artists and investors who believe that through best in class investing along with the democratization of financial education we can do great things together. Enjoy, Explore and Share.

Major indices moved lower this week— the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average are both on track to close down 1.6%, at around 4,600 and 35,660, respectively. The Nasdaq Composite Index, meanwhile, is down 2.5%, hovering around 14,711 as markets continue to digest this week’s developments. During his Senate confirmation, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called inflation a “severe threat” to full economic recovery and confirmed the Fed is preparing to raise interest rates and unwind its balance sheet, which currently sits at $8.788 trillion. At a separate confirmation hearing, the nominee for Fed Vice Chair, Lael Brainard, reiterated that the Fed’s number one priority was to reduce inflation. An increase in interest rates will have an adverse effect on stock valuations generally, especially “growth” securities, while a tapering and unwinding of the Fed’s asset purchasing program will have the effect of reducing economic growth.Almost as if to confirm the urgency of the inflationary environment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its latest year-over-year and month-to-month readings for consumer and producer prices, which are measures of prices paid by consumers for a market basket of goods and services, and prices of goods as they leave their place of production, respectively. Headline CPI came in at 7%, its highest reading year-over-year increase since June 1982. US PPI Final Demand, on the other hand, registered at 9.7% year-over-year, the highest reading ever since its inception in November 2010. A silver lining in the data was a decline in the pace of month-to-month PPI growth, from 0.9% in November to 0.5% in December 2021.Lastly, retail sales registered a 1.9% decline month-over-month, below consensus expectations of -0.1%, which may be partly attributable to the omicron variant and a holiday sales pull-forward as retailers implemented promotions earlier in the season. Separately, the University of Michigan its latest Consumer Sentiment Index reading of 68.8 versus an expected 70.0, indicating declining attitudes and expectations regarding personal finances, and general business and market conditions and prices.

Thank you Blue Room Team Leader Omar Guzman

I am a tinkerer. As a kid I broke far more things than I built, and my happiest place is in learning “how it works”. I grew up in an engineering home (my dad worked in the Aerospace engineering industry); I was lucky to have great opportunities to build and break everything from electronics to cars to hot water heaters. In college, I began to formalize my skills, studying electrical engineering, and had the good fortune to intern with aerospace companies including one summer in the control center of the GOES weather satellite program. While exploring space was intriguing, studying at Duke opened my eyes to an even more compelling universe: the human body. I broadened my studies to included biomedical engineering. Blending my natural curiosity, and my electrical and biomedical focus, I dove into electrophysiology, or the electrical circuitry of the body, then into immunology and finally into the imaging and treatment of cancer. I spent over 20 years, including earning a PhD at the University of Virginia, working in the cancer space, developing and commercializing medical products that improved patient experience and outcomes.

For the first decade of my career, I stayed true to my tinkerer roots, inventing and solving complex medical problems. For the last 12 years, I broadened my scope to bring impactful ideas to market by leading companies from the initial concept through commercialization. I have found that I can have an even greater impact by empowering teams to pursue answers, refine ideas, and scale to meet market needs. My game plan and mission is the same: uncover how something fundamentally works, determine the areas that need the top priority investment of people and money, set goals, and continuously improve until you exceed the goals. I am excited to transition my experience to Blue Room to help drive progress across the impact companies and investments by applying my creative problem solving and deep experience to high impact projects in grain, housing and art. As I look ahead at the next decade, I’m excited to work with highly driven and passionate people, in a diverse and inclusive culture, who work every day to strengthen the fabric of Blue Room and make a positive impact through business.

Highlights:

Reviewed milestones that have occurred within the last 30 days, including authorizations through the WHO, Europe, India, Indonesia and the Philippines
10 million doses delivered to Indonesia and will deliver another 40 million in coming quarters
Targeting 80 million doses for the COVAX facility through the GAVI alliance
27-million-dose EU order due this quarter was expanded to include 42 million doses for second quarter delivery
2373 has demonstrated high efficacy, a favorable safety profile and strong responses to COVID variants
“People simply want a safe and effective protein-based vaccine”
Key distribution and administration benefits include storage of standard refrigeration temperatures, an assigned 9-month shelf life, a 10-dose vial presentation, and a ready-to-use formulation
“Unvaccinated” rates: 30% in high-income countries and 46% in upper-middle income countries still need three doses in 2022
- Over 90% of the world still needs their first booster dose
Pursuing label indications for booster and pediatric vaccinations leveraging prior and ongoing studies
“We saw no cases of severe disease, hospitalization, or death with any variants in these studies”
Initiating Omicron-specific vaccine studies this quarter
- “Our response to the Omicron variant demonstrates a hallmark of our vaccine—our ability to rapidly develop and scale a strain change if and when one is needed”
Expect to announce data from Phase 1/2 NanoFlu and Combination Vaccine in the first half of 2022
Product pipeline includes development of combination vaccines to protect against COVID-19, flu, and RSV simultaneously
They are seeing both homologous and heterologous immunity that looks highly protective in ongoing Booster trial
They anticipate their COVID-Flu combination vaccine “to be something on the order of an annual immunization, like the flu in the past”

Corporate Profile:

At Precision BioSciences, leaders in genome editing utilize the ARCUS editing platform to eliminate cancers, cure genetic diseases, and create safer, more productive food sources.

Genome editing technologies allow us to rethink our approach to a broad array of serious challenges faced by the world today. We now have the ability to precisely edit the DNA of a living organism, opening up the possibility of correcting genetic problems at their source.

Precision BioSciences is dedicated to improving life through its proprietary genome editing platform, “ARCUS”. Precision leverages ARCUS in the development of its product candidates, which are designed to treat human diseases in three innovative areas: allogeneic CAR T immunotherapy, in vivo gene correction, and food.

Corporate Profile:

Guardant Health is a leading precision oncology company dedicated to helping conquer cancer through our proprietary blood tests, vast data sets, and advanced analytics.

Cancer is data starved. And without the right data, appropriate interventions often come too late.

To select the best treatment, doctors and patients must have access to detailed genomic information about the disease. But this information is not easy to get. Traditional tissue biopsies require physical access to tumor tissue and come with serious risks for some patients. And for many patients, they aren’t even an option. In addition, they do little to help detect cancer early, when patients have the best chance at successful treatment.

We believe the key to conquering cancer is unprecedented access to its molecular information throughout all stages of the disease. We are developing a solution through tests that require only a blood sample.

Mathematics is essential to the advancement of the human race. Its applications are vast and are used across multiple disciplines including chemistry, biology, physics, economics, computer science and many other academic fields. Discoveries in pure mathematics have helped to further the breadth of human knowledge for generations. For instance, in 1830, Lobachevsky and Bolyai proved the independence of Euclid’s fifth axiom. This revolutionary proof was then applied in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. As automated theorem proving begins to expand the corpus of mathematical knowledge, the applications will surely be groundbreaking. However, before delving into the potential benefits of expanding mathematical knowledge through automated theorem proving, it is necessary to understand the logic behind the automation of proving theorems.

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BLUE ROOM
MEETING

#73
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Thursday January 13, 2022

We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to honor a man who fearlessly lead a campaign for good from a place in love in a world of hate.

He had a Dream.

Read Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech in its entirety:

READ SPEECH

QUESTIONS

(choose one or more):
+ Who are leaders that you admire and why?
+ If you could bring back MLK to change the world today, where should we focus?
+ What is your dream to change the world? What holds you back? What pushes you forward?

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