Submitted via Portfolio Armor: 

Meet The New Number Two 

In our previous post (Tim Scott's Shady Campaign Spending), we looked at some anomalous spending on shell companies by the GOP candidate currently in 3rd place in Iowa and New Hampshire, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. 

As we wrote there, Scott is worth paying attention to because he has been mooted as a possible Trump running mate. The same is true of rising star Vivek Ramaswamy, who just climbed past Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to become the second most popular GOP Presidential candidate after Donald Trump.

Unlike DeSantis, Ramaswamy has proved to be an excellent campaigner, and apparently, the more GOP voters see of him, the more they like him. But a recent analysis of his pharma career raises some questions about him. 

Making Money Marketing A Failed Alzheimer's Drug 

The video below, by Kevin Paffrath, details how Vivek Ramaswamy made money off of a failed Alzheimer's drug. In a nutshell: 

1. Ramaswamy's parent company (Roivant) spent $5 million (a tiny amount, by biotech standards) buying the rights to a drug candidate for Alzheimer's disease from GSK, plc (the former GlaxoSmithKline) that had failed four out of four clinical trials, and formed a subsidiary company around it called Axovant.  

2. Ramaswamy's mother (a physician) took one of the failed clinical trials and reinterpreted it, by eliminating patients who didn't stay with the trial (because of side effects, the drug not working, or whatever), claiming there was some statistical benefit to the drug. 

3. Ramaswamy brought Axovant public, raising $362 million in its IPO, for a drug Paffrath claims Ramaswamy knew would fail its stage three clinical trial. 

4. The drug failed, and Axovant (now called Sio Gene Therapies) is down 99.75% from its IPO.