Psychedelic investment continues to ramp up

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Hello! Hope your team of choice was victorious in last night’s sports ball match. Today, we talk about psychedelics, obesity, and production issues with generic drugs. We also discuss the ongoing issues of scientific misconduct that are springing up left and right in academia, and how universities are scrambling to keep up.

The need-to-know this morning

• Pfizer ran a Super Bowl ad that celebrated its 175-year history and a commitment to finding new treatments for cancer. The soundtrack was Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” lip synced by animated portraits, sculptures and sepia-toned photos of Pfizer founders Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, along with Rosalind Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton, Hippocrates, Rosalind Franklin, Albert Einstein, Katalin Karikó and others. Really good ad, probably won’t make a bit of difference.
• Travis Kelce, a pitchman for Pfizer’s Covid-19 and flu vaccines, won the Super Bowl.
• AN2 Therapeutics said a blinded analysis of a Phase 2 study evaluating its drug epetraborole in an infectious lung disease showed “potentially lower-than-expected efficacy.” As a result, the company is pausing enrollment in an ongoing Phase 3 study.
• Larimar Therapeutics reported results from a Phase 2 study evaluating its drug nomlabofusp for Friedrich’s Ataxia.

Universities scrambling to keep up with scientific misconduct

Evidence of scientific misconduct is growing exceedingly common, STAT reports — with allegations, as reported to the NIH, having more than doubled from 2013 to 2022. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is investigating potential discrepancies involved in about 60 papers coauthored by four of its top researchers over a 15-year period.

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