Propably better off investing in an index fund | Prescribe side
Joined October 2025
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$mane wtf does it have a mc of ~ $5 billion?
At 17 mg/day (8.5 mg twice daily), the reported increase was 36.4 hairs/cm².
Conventional oral minoxidil at just 5 mg once daily achieved 35.9 hairs/cm² in a smaller published study.
I don’t see compelling evidence of a meaningful advantage over normal release oral minoxidil, which is available now at my Immortals Pharmacy.
I personally take 3.5 mg daily.
Cluelessbio retweeted
I thought early-stage pharma investors were dumb. Thanks to $MANE I learned I was wrong.
Just got invited to an advisory board for them. I'd written them off, the thesis seemed too silly to survive.
But an ad board means they're coming to market, so I took another look, had my jaw drop, and declined the invite. I almost said yes just to see how they framed it, but I can't tolerate spending an hour listening to a dumb pitch and keeping my mouth shut about how dumb it is.
And I didn't want to risk getting "confidential information" which would make it harder to criticize them, which I need to do so people don't think this is representative of dermatology.
Dermatology is a real specialty, developing truly innovative treatments for life ruining diseases like hidradentis suppurativa and horrible eczema and psoriasis. I've got 10+ of those kinds of trials running right now.
Back to $MANE.
What I learned and why my jaw dropped is that very early money is brilliant. IPO and pre-IPO buyers got a 6x on a hair-loss "breakthrough" that's just oral minoxidil, something that costs $2/month on GoodRx.
The "breakthrough" is extended-release. What does that buy you over the $2 generic?
Avoid cardiac toxicity? Nobody worries about cardiac toxicity with low-dose oral minoxidil.
Less hypertrichosis? No reason it would. Hypertrichosis tracks total dose, not peak plasma concentration. Extended release lowers the peak, not the dose.
What would it take to be an actual breakthrough? Run a head-to-head against the generic. Be better or safer and you've got a drug.
They were too smart for that, because they know what it'd show. Nobody trying to bring an expensive branded version of a cheap generic to market runs a head-to-head. They didn't need to. They just need a story.
So, their brilliant move was avoiding that trial and keeping a story alive that sounds plausible to non-experts. That kept people excited, people who ran it up 6x after the IPO.
Why am I sure it won't fly? Back it out of the analyst models and they need ~$75/month to turn a profit. That's 36x the price of a generic with no proven advantage over it.
We have the history in the hair loss market that lets us see if that holds up. Topical minoxidil never held a 2x premium over generic. Propecia built a real brand and died the day it went generic. Patients don't pay 36x for the same molecule in a nicer box.
So the very early money isn't dumb. They made 6x on a joke and they're handing the bag to whoever's still holding at $100 today.
The thing I can't figure out now is who's dumber: the analysts who told people to buy at the IPO, or the people who listened, ran it to $100, and are still holding.
Why isn‘t there anything to systemically improve connective tissue resilience? Would be a societal health benefit that exceeds GLP1s…
$nktr wtf is the jury doing? I am waiting for the $5 trial-pop in stock price since a year now.
$VKTX Even if vktx would sell at generic prices right from the start for its ~12 year patent protection, what would its peak sales be if it captures 20 % or more of the obesity market? Lower margin yes, but would be an enormous volume on this „generic“.
140 million GLP obesity patients by 2035, average monthly price worldwide $70, net margin 10 %, 20 % market share, thats ~$2 billion in profit each year.
$abvx Just to show how crowded the TL1A space is in comparison
TL1A global competitive landscape
An exhaustive list of programs surfaced by @sleuthinsights from patents, company websites, news / press releases, conference abstracts and publications.
Plus some thoughts on this opportunity will evolve in 2025 and beyond:
This is a hot target - in just the last few years we've seen multiple >$1B deals centered on TL1A-targeting assets
• Merck / Prometheus acquisition ($10.8B)
• Roche / Televant acquisition ($7.1B upfront)
• Sanofi / Teva licensing ($1.5B)
• AbbVie / FutureGen licensing (~$1.7B)
TL1A signaling plays critical roles in driving pathogenesis across various autoimmune diseases, with development furthest along within IBD.
Merck (tulisokibart), Roche (RG6631) and Sanofi / Teva (duvakitug) hold the three most advanced assets in this class, all of which have prioritized IBD as the lead indication. All three have demonstrated >20% placebo-adjusted clinical remission on at least one dose, even across bio-experienced patient subgroups.
One key debate for the ongoing Ph3s is whether anti-TL1A will work in anti-TNF refractory patients given target family similarity. In Merck's Ph2b ARTEMIS-UC study, only 3/25 anti-TNF exposed patients reached remission. This is critical since anti-TNF remains a 1L mainstay across I&I indications, particularly post-LOE.
And while those trials enroll, much of the news flow in 2025 will focus on emerging assets, early-stage data (i.e. dosing) and trial initiations.
TL1A's potential anti-fibrotic effect may determine whether it achieves blockbuster sales and justifies M&A takeouts, as this would be a meaningful differentiator in a fairly crowded category. Without that, TL1A could struggle to stand out despite solid efficacy / safety, as IBD physicians already have several effective, familiar, safe drug classes on the market (i.e. IL-23p19, α4β7)
Comment "Sleuth" below if you'd like access to a hi-Res PDF and Excel of this landscape and we'll DM or email it to you.
And if you're a biopharma leader whose team is pulling these analyses together manually right now, keep reading...
While the below landscape provides a high-level overview of this space, if you're actively developing here or taking a close look, you'd want a much deeper dive, such as:
• Upcoming catalysts
• Competitive positioning with market evolution forecasting
• Clinical development strategy assessment
• Pharma partnering interest & portfolio gap analysis
Pulling all that together might take an analyst a few days, but with Sleuth you can generate all of this in a few minutes, tailored to your bespoke questions. It's a big claim, but we're doing this right now for dozens of Pharma, biotech and investor clients. Send me a DM or comment below if you'd like to learn more!
$kymr $nktr $crvs $apge kymera up the most following the apogee deal. There must be a lesson in @JoseRestonVA picks.