Good Morning, We'll be watching for Quest's update after the close and we continue to flip through every state on a regular basis to see how COVID-19 cases are trending. Dario announced another [small] deal and One Medical and Iora looks on track to close. Send us an email if you have any questions/feedback or would like to see/discuss any of the data - .
KEY CALL OUT
Our Best Idea long Quest (DGX) will update its COVID-19 testing volume this afternoon. The price chart has been correlating with the rise in COVID-19 cases since June as the Delta Variant spread throughout the United States, although predominantly contained to the Southeast. A look at COVID trends in Florida as of yesterday, the day over day continues to pull back from the recent peak in daily admissions set on 8/18/2021, right around the same time DGX put in their daily closing high. Is Delta Variant the last wave? Is the reopening finally going to fill in the massive deficit of deferred care? As of July 2021, 14% of Americans surveyed continue to report delaying care because of COVID-19, which is down from a peak of 40%, and subsequently likely moved higher as Delta Variant ramped over the last 2 months. Florida's Hospital dashboard looks pretty good right now. For DGX, we think the setup is a best-of-both-worlds, continued COVID testing as schools and businesses return to greater levels of in-person, and the return of in-person medical care. Delta isn't the last wave, but it’s likely the last big one.
POSITION MONITOR
NEWS & POSITION MONITOR/WATCHLIST COMPANY UPDATES
ONEM - 8-K - Shareholders approved the issuance of stock to buy Iora. We continue to speak with executives and practitioners in the primary care ecosystem and have some more work to do on the ONEM+Iora combination as we've heard mixed feedback on Iora's "fit" with core One Medical. We have a good tracker for Iora and the other APC models we will be rolling out shortly.
DRIO - DarioHealth Chosen by Regional Primary Care Provider PeopleOne Health as its Digital Behavioral Health Partner (PR). PeopleOne Health is a 3-office Direct Primary Care provider that appears to have 3 doctors, and this is another win for WayForward, which has seen success recently with a handful of closed deals over the past month and change. Adding mental health support/steering to primary care makes sense to us, but we're still waiting for the core MyDario win.
NSTG - NanoString’s GeoMx Digital Spatial Profiling (DSP) Platform Reveals Insights Into the Immune Landscape of Cancer in Publication in the Journal Cell (PR). Favorable PR highlights "using single cell transcriptomics, in situ hybridization, and GeoMx DSP to assess the mechanisms governing interactions between colorectal tumor cells and tumor-infiltrating immune cells." As we've highlighted for TXG and NSTG previously, more favorable peer-reviewed articles/studies involving these platforms is almost always a good thing because once a researcher/lab uses one tech, they stick with it because of the data and the platform becomes the standard.
DeepMind has unlocked protein-based medicine – what does that mean for drug patents? (MedCity News) - If you haven't kept up with what Alphabet's DeepMind is doing, that's a nice, easy to read summary to date with a little extra on the legal side: "Protein-misfolding is at the root of a number of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Diseases... While naturally-occurring proteins that DeepMind disclosed in its 3D structure dump are not patentable under the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Myriad and cases following, any synthetically derived or unnaturally-structured proteins might be. “If it’s not a natural protein, subject matter protection is less of a hurdle so any such discovery would be eligible,” O’Connor said, "and I could envision traditional claiming based on primary amino acids and a further layer of claiming based on the cell structure.”
MICROQUADS*
As a reminder, if you have questions about the MicroQuad process, please try to find ~20 minutes to watch our Dec 30, 2020 call replay: Process & Utility of the Hedgeye Health Care #MicroQuads - CLICK HERE for event details (includes video link and materials link).
CALENDAR
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Have a great day out there!
Thomas Tobin
Managing Director
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Justin Venneri
Director, Primary Research
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William McMahon
Analyst
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*Please note, not all Position Monitor names make it into the MicroQuad output - most likely due to a lack of sufficient historical trading and estimate data.
