Hope you all had good four-day work weeks! I can feel the fall air trying to make its way into Brooklyn, but here’s hoping we can hold onto summer temperatures a little longer.
A volunteer is injected with either an experimental COVID-19 vaccine or a comparison shot as part of the first human trials to test a potential vaccine, led by Oxford University. Associated Press
The participant, AstraZeneca's CEO later said, had serious neurologic symptoms, and the trial is on hold until researchers can get a better idea of what's going on. AstraZeneca hasn't said when the trial might resume.
To be sure, clinical trials are paused all the time, and whether this will have long term implications for AstraZeneca's vaccine — or coronavirus vaccines as a whole — remains to be seen.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be keeping an eye out for what's ahead for AstraZeneca's vaccine, as well as for immunizations from the other frontrunners, Moderna and Pfizer.
I found it helpful to read through analyst notes about likely scenarios for AstraZeneca's vaccine once we know more about what happened with the participant. The scenarios range from just a few weeks off schedule, to the end of the line for the experimental shot, to more serious implications for vaccine hopes.
Now that I'm editing more, I haven't had as much time to go as deep down reporting rabbit holes.
But this summer, I made one exception: I heard about the Employer Health Innovation Roundtable (or EHIR) for the first time in June.
I quickly realized its ability to match employers like Google and Boeing with young startups looking to break into the employer-funded healthcare market had set so many companies I've followed over the years on the path to success.
So over the past few months, I've spoken with startup and employer participants to get an inside look at how the process works and what it's led to. Here's what I learned.
It might be the end of the line for coronavirus stimulus hopes, at least until the election.
Kimberly this week spent time keeping tabs on Congress's latest attempt to pass a coronavirus stimulus bill.
This one, brought forth by Republican leadership in the Senate, would've included $500 billion in relief, but didn't include another round of checks. It was voted down on Thursday.
Finally, blink and you might've missed that there was a whole slew of financing developments this week among healthcare startups. Here's what you need to know:
Grail, a cancer detection company backed by Jeff Bezos, filed to go public this week. Read its S-1 here.
Truepill, a pharmacy startup that powers DTC healthcare companies just raised another $75 million. I've been following the company since its early days in 2019, and you can read more about its ambitions here.
