A couple of years ago, I wrote about a startup called EQRx and their plans to change pricing in the drug industry. I was. . .skeptical, to put things lightly, because their initial plans were to come up with ten new drugs in ten years, through the magic of cloud computing and third-party outsourcing. These were going to be in existing therapeutic categories, me-toos, but they would compete on low pricing.

No, that really was the plan. If you read that post, you’ll see statements from their founder about how you can screen a billion compounds in the cloud overnight, how the world has changed, etc. And you can see some stuff from one of their backers, Silicon Valley’s own a16z, about how EQRx is “reimagining how medicines are created” and more. I wasn’t buying any of it, for reasons that are explained (in increasingly annoyed language) in that linked post above.

In fact, I was moved to put up a $500 challenge on LongBets that they would not be able to do it. No one ever took me up on it, and now no one ever will. EQRx went public in July of last year, and even by then the billion-compounds-in-the-cloud hoo-hah had already evaporated, and as far as I know has never been heard of again. The new business model was to buy up various me-too compounds from Chinese pharmas and bring them to market in the US, there to compete on price as before. I wasn’t so sure about that idea, either, and wondered in that post what the shareholders would think about a company whose slogan was “Making Less Money Than We Otherwise Could”.

And now it appears that that exact issue has obliterated what’s left of their world-changing business model. The company has abandoned their compete-on-price strategy, at least for their first two drugs, and I will be surprised if we ever hear about that part again, either. As that last link details, they were bringing along an EGFR inhibitor (aumoletinib) that was extremely similar to AstraZeneca’s Tagrisso (osimertinib), and they now say that they will adopt market-based pricing for it and for another inlicensed kinase inhibitor, lerociclib. They were also working on an inlicensed PD-1 antibody (sugemalimab) but that one has now been abandoned, because the company says that they see “no commercially viable path” for it.

You might imagine that the stock market, full of greedy profiteers as it is, would welcome this heel turn to actually making as much money as possible. But as I write EQRX shares are at $3.62, down about 34% today. The IPO was at ten dollars a share, and until about a year ago you could have bailed without taking too much of a loss, but since then the stock slid to trading mostly in the $5 range, and  it might be heading for a new low today (since I’ve had to adjust that quoted price downward just while writing this post).

Well, as I said when the company first appeared, what I objected to with them was not their attempts to revamp drug discovery and drug pricing. It was the billowing clouds of hype that accompanied it. If someone is going to change the world, I’d prefer that they just go out there and do it, rather than give interviews about just how impressive and world-changing it is that their world-changing techniques to change the world are impressing everyone so much. If you know what I mean.