👋 Good morning. Any chance you’ve seen 40k pounds of Pabst Blue Ribbon? No? Well, someone made off with nearly $70k worth of loot in a two-part cargo heist at a Southern California Anheuser-Busch distribution center by using fraudulent trucking documentation. Pabst said on social media that it would offer a reward to anyone with information regarding the theft, though we’d imagine it’s hard to top 40k pounds of beer.
NEWS FLASH
🪴 Don’t kill all of your houseplants: It may be as simple as just asking the plants how they’re feeling. Italian startup PlantVoice is basically doing that to aid the agricultural sector. Its new "plant intelligence" platform monitors plants’ real-time physiological data, analyzing it alongside more traditional inputs like weather and soil to make recommendations for better crop health. Feel your feelings, plants.
💊 A tough pill to swallow: Last week, the FDA approved Rasonque, Revolution Medicines’ new treatment for pancreatic cancer. While there’s much to feel good about — patients who got the pill lived ~2x as long as those who received chemotherapy — the treatment comes with some sticker shock. The medicine costs $663 per tablet, or ~$480k per year, and is not an outlier. Nine cancer drugs launched above $400k annually in 2024 alone, and oncology’s biggest drug, Keytruda, costs $213k per year before insurance and has been used by several million patients.
☕ Noticing a lot more green signage going up in your city? It might have something to do with the Blank Street Coffee takeover. The VC-backed chain recently raised $105m to fuel its West Coast expansion after already conquering Boston and London. Expect more snaking lines and matcha-wielding influencers near you: The company has grown from a Brooklyn coffee cart to a $650m valuation in just six years.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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Big sneakers to fill: Monday was Tim Cook’s last day as CEO of Apple, and John Ternus is now at the helm. If you think starting your new job was intimidating: one Bank of America analyst estimates that Apple’s market cap grew ~$32m per hour, every hour, for the 15 years Cook was CEO.
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Part of God’s plan?: Drake sold a majority stake in his lifestyle brand OVO to licensing titan Authentic Brands Group. It puts the rapper in the same corporate family as — strangely — Reebok, Care Bears, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sports Illustrated, and Forever 21. Huh.
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Feels about right: BuzzBallz knows its fan base well, collaborating with Pop-Tarts on s’mores and brown-sugar cinnamon flavored,15% ABV canned cocktails. Just like the toaster pastries, the drink feels like a bad and good idea all at the same time.
- Building buzz: Ready-to-drink coffee brand Beekeeper Coffee announced a round of investors that reads more like an ESPN commercial. NBA stars Draymond Green and Anthony Davis, golfer Min Woo Lee, and NFL quarterback Jared Goff are all in.
STEAL THIS STACK
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THE BIG IDEA
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This startup wants to replace animal testing with human testing… kind of
If there’s one thing most people can agree on, even if for different reasons, it’s that animal testing is bad — ask animal rights activists, politicians on either side of the aisle, or even the FDA, which has been pushing to move away from the practice since 2022.
Not only is it cruel, it’s also a wildly expensive, time-consuming, and unproductive way to gauge the efficacy and safety of drugs on humans (e.g., finding a cure for cancer in rats doesn’t necessarily equal finding a cure for humans because, well, we’re not rats).
- Clinical trials can cost tens of millions of dollars and 90% fail to receive FDA approval, a number that pretty much hasn’t changed for decades, largely due to the research models behind them, like animal and single-cell testing.
Biotech startup Vivodyne thinks its tech could help do away with animal testing while making drug development faster and a lot more effective.
It just opened the world’s largest “biological data center” near San Francisco, where it is using AI to run experiments on lab-grown human tissue.
How it works
- In 12 robotic mini labs, it uses human cells to grow 20+ different types of human organ tissues on “biological chips” to the size of large medical biopsies that self-assemble into structures with blood vessels, immune cells, and some of the same organ functions.
- The automated system then runs thousands of AI-designed experiments on the tissues, both healthy and diseased, to see how they respond to different therapies or drugs, powering a self-driving experimentation loop to better predict how safe and effective a drug will be.
A better way to test
At least 20 other biotechs are also working on “organ-on-a-chip” platforms. But what sets Vivodyne’s system apart is its scale.
- The startup’s data center can run controlled trials on 3m+ human tissues every year — twice the capacity of every clinical trial in the US combined, and up to 1k times the scale of similar platforms.
Plus, Vivodyne, which is already working with several major pharmaceutical companies, says that its AI system would not only speed up drug discovery but also vastly enhance our understanding of human biology by making it “computable.”
In the meantime, CEO Andrei Georgescu says that animal testing will continue, but that lab rats should probably consider their retirement plans pretty soon.
“The failure rate is so high from animals, I think any alternative is going to very quickly dominate,” he told Fast Company.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… and a good way to make $80k/month, apparently. Just ask this app founder.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
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How little you could pay for your next vacation, if you’re willing to roll the dice on where in the world it might be. A Groupon deal from UK-based travel agency Mystery Vacations, which covers airfare and hotels on two- to seven-night trips to mystery destinations, has blown up amid soaring travel costs — and Americans, with a “growing penchant for gambling,” The New York Times reports, are all in.
It could put you anywhere from Las Vegas and Tampa to, if you’re lucky, somewhere more exotic like Singapore, Iceland, or the Caribbean. Though we wouldn’t bet on the latter — the odds of scoring a gold-tier trip to places in Europe and Asia are 0.3%.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1998, it became US law that all new passenger vehicles must have front airbags on both sides.
☄️ Game: Eye on the ball!
🚽 Haha: Pick a urinal, any urinal.
🥳 Come hang: HubSpot Media is throwing a party and we want to see you there.
🐶 Aww: Hmmm?
SHOWER THOUGHT
When we blink, we close both eyes at the same time. It might have been better to do it alternatively, so we would always have one eye open. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Free the rats" Friedman.
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