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Galenisys Newsletter : August 2026

Table of Contents

• A BLOODY TIME IN THE DESERT
  TALES FROM FARAWAY PHARMA: You can’t audit them all
  By Steve Biddulph

• DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH FINGERS?
  Overweight on Lilly shares?
  By Tony Dunford

• THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
  What insects do for us, and health.
  Tony Dunford

• THE QUICK CHECKLIST
  Reducing or avoiding mental decline

A BLOODY TIME IN THE DESERT

TALES FROM FARAWAY PHARMA

by Steve Biddulph

Fellow of Royal Society of Biology. Board level pharma experience. QSM and Aseptic Manufacturing & Control Expertise. Galenisys Managing Director.

You can’t audit them all

Following the crises with HIV and Hepatitis contaminated blood in the 1980s and 1990s, we started to audit clinics in the USA where blood was collected for the blood derivative product of our affiliate.

Auditing thoroughly included studying the records of how the blood was collected from the sources ie whom, and what testing had been done before the blood could be declared safe.

(When I was very young there was a British comedian named Tony Hancock whom I recalled when considered blood donor profiles. In one particular episode of the long running series he had volunteered to give blood; but then almost fainted when he realised that the litre he was expected to donate was a whole armful).
We knew that In the USA people can sell their blood.

So, anyone a little desperate for money could offload the odd litre or so. This is not looked upon as a morally acceptable business, however and is strictly controlled by FDA guidelines. However, many people are compensated for providing plasma.
Some folks can make between 400 and 1,000 dollars per month through repeated plasma donations.

There are many plasma centres in the States and one such was located in Yuma, Arizona. So, I set off there under a cloudless sky and in bright sunshine. After a morning in the local plasma centre, I set about the long road trip to Ajo, Southwest of Phoenix and close to the border with Mexico.

At the entry to the town, I stopped the car & got out to ask for directions, but in doing so managed to stand on a cactus, a spine of which went straight through the sole of the shoe into my foot!

The pain was horrible and I immediately put my hand on the car bonnet to steady myself and thus burning my hand on the sun heated bonnet (we were, after all, in the desert in Southern Arizona in the height of summer). I regained the car, ensured that the air conditioning was operating at maximum and proceeded to remove my bloodied shoe and the cactus spine with some difficulty.

There's only so much a dedicated auditor can take in a day and so after some self-medication I gave a resigned mental shrug, rested up, and then said goodbye to dangerous Ajo. There were plenty other safer places on the list of clinics I’d planned to visit, although not expected to see them all.
And after all I had nobly shed blood in a good cause!

Steve Biddulph

DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH FINGERS?

Overweight on Lilly shares?

By Tony Dunford

As Bloomberg & the business media have reported Eli Lilly has become the world’s most valuable drug maker. Try counting the zeros in its $1 trillion valuation on your fingers. Of course, it's long been the route to riches to float your company after running it privately, but the other additional way is for it to appear to be a new sort of company.

The market likes Lilly’s big bet on preventive medicines and lessons from “big tech” to in effect reinvent itself.

Since the start of 2023 its share price has more than tripled. Analysts expect its revenue to grow by around 15% a year on average until the end of the decade more than three times the median of its peers. Investors now value Lilly more like a tech giant than a drug maker. In Lilly's case the hype driving the multiple are GLP-1 agonists the new class of obesity drugs, rather than the promise of AI.

With over 100 million obese people in the USA alone the global market is huge and typically estimated at > $120 billion a year by 2030. Lilly could win 2/3 of it. (This compares with the $173 billion cost / yr to America of treating obesity according to the CDC). Sales of Zepbound Lilly's slimming jab were $4.9 billion in 2024 its 1st year.

Lilly's dominance in this market has been put down to:

• beefing up its manufacturing capacity early, with $50bn of investment.
• pricing lower than the competition,
• the recognition that obesity would become a consumer market as well as a medical one.
• and that its product produced greater weight loss with fewer side effects than its Danish rival Novo Nordisk. However, this claim has been challenged by Novo in a legal suite.

Naturally such a fat market is leading to the overweight bandwagon of over 120 companies developing therapies. Lilly hopes to keep ahead by offering a range of product forms, with combinations of efficacy, convenience, and tolerability.

In an interview with the Economist Dave Ricks Lily's chief executive laid out a grander plan, Lilly would become drug company focused on keeping people healthy rather than simply treating diseases. He would emulate some Silicon Valley tech approaches also.

Lilly’s keeping people healthy strategy is facilitated since the GLP -1 products reduce the risks of developing diseases brought on by obesity and overweight such as cardiovascular disease, sleep apnoea, and chronic kidney disease, & possibly addiction and psychiatric illness.

Pursuing this “multiplier effect” saw Lilly acquiring Centessa pharmaceuticals who have a narcolepsy product in development to regulate the brain's sleep cycles and regulating sleep may be valuable in combating other afflictions. Similarly, an Alzheimer candidate product in development to treat Alzheimer's could also be found to work in patients without symptoms or prevent them occurring.

We’ve got to think of who purchases as well as who sells. How will health care systems and insurers deal with this new world? It's worth noting that the public is, for the moment, willing to pay typically £200 / month legally on these weight reducing products.

And people could just start eating better!

Tony Dunford

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

What insects do for us and health.

By Tony Dunford

We had guests at the chalet this month (July) and one of them took advantage of being in the nature to photograph insects on the flowers and lakes nearby. Later we ended up discussing insects.

When I used to drive here 40 years ago, I always needed to clean the windscreen thoroughly as it was plastered with the remains of insects that had been hit on the autoroute. Now I don't need to bother and it's a bad sign that there are very few insects around compared with years ago.
(I shouldn’t be surprised:
X insects/mile x 12000miles/year (say) x several100 million drivers = A LOT of dead insects)

We got talking about the ones that are beneficial & the ones that we’re glad to see the back of.

FIRST OF ALL, SOME “GOOD” ONES

We agreed “Hats off” to the Bees, and all the human friendly pollinators.

Less well known but equally “Good” are the those who help the pharmaceutical industry’s research - like blowfly larva (that cleanup drug-resistant bacteria in human wounds), silkworms (for screening drug efficacy, toxicity, and pharmokinectics), and fruit flies (long employed to study the genes of diseases in humans, neurological disorders, and drug addiction).

And then we agreed that those who bring us flashes of beauty by their colours or behaviour, like the butterflies (“papillons” or “demoiselles” in French).

ON PROBATION

On probation are ants if they help clear up rotting fruit and vegetables, & don’t bite; as opposed to those that were in the kitchen this month sizing up an apple to munch:

“Shall I start here Fred?”

THE BAD ONES

Obviously, mosquitoes spring to mind and I'm glad that, at least here, we no longer have to search the walls of the room before putting the light out at night, or fear that distinctive whine when dozing off. Locusts are also in the dock, and plague is the right word to describe them particularly when they devastate the crops on which African subsistence farmers depend. OK advocates claim they are very tasty morsels of protein when roasted but the farmers won't be able to afford these.

THE UGLY

There are some pretty ugly and repulsive insects around, but don't write them off.
Things like cockroaches, maggots, dung beetles, and millipedes are a members the group of “detritivores” that go around in their billions cleaning up the waste products of humans, animals and other species. Vital work. If they didn’t do it, we'd be up to our knees in you know what.

REHABILITATION
It was interesting to read of the recent rehabilitation of the bloodsucking midges which many have cursed when visiting Scandinavia or Scotland.

After high temperatures & a poor harvest in West Africa in April 2024, the price of cocoa beans passed $10,000 per tonne for the first time - significantly higher than earlier in the decade. OK, the natural reaction is to try to produce more cocoa plants, and this necessitates more pollination. The solution to this more efficient pollination has been suggested by a PhD team from Brussels in the publication Basic & Applied Ecology.

Pollinating the cocoa bean flower means a tight & complicated crawl for any insects to get to the sweet nectar. And it’s also hard for researchers wanting to see what’s going on. The successful approach was to capture those insects that did get to the flower’s reproductive organs & check which type of insects were covered with cocoa pollen.

Ants, bees, & various midges all turned up inside the flowers, but the great majority of pollen carriers were the biting midges. The rub is that the midges are far more active when it’s cool and humid. The bad news for cocoa farmers is climate change which means their plants have been getting warmer and drier.

Anyway it’s the biting midges we must tolerate, nay encourage in Africa to keep the cocoa price down & our yummy chocolate bars affordable.

Tony Dunford

THE QUICK CHECKLIST

(Holidays are a good time think about your lifestyle choices)

1. START SLIMMING Obesity increases the risk of DEMENTIA 20 years later*.

2. ADDRESS HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE / LDL CHOLESTEROL / POOR FITNESS, to also reduce later dementia risk*.

3. TREAT DEAFNESS & VISION LOSS
   to increase mental stimulation & avoid isolation.

4. GET A SHINGLES JAB IF OFFERED THE VACCINE
   an unexpected bonus.

5. CLEAN TEETH WELL
   infected gums may harm the brain.

6. “A BLESSED COMPANION IS A BOOK”

(*Data from big, randomised control trials USA Australia Japan Finland….)