Sanofi-Aventis' takeover bid for Genzyme

Hello and Happy New Year!

The talks between Sanofi-Aventis and Genzyme regarding a buyout have started on August 30th 2010, when Sanofi made an unsolicited offer to buy Genzyme for $18.5 billion. I won't go into much details regarding the economics behind this deal, or the history of the negotations, but the sure thing is that they are still in progress.

Let's see how the possible merger between the 2 companies has been reflected in the Newistic social media analysis dashboard last month. First of all, let's look at the volume of mentions about them in the last 30 days. As you can see, there have been several spikes, the biggest being on December 20th last year and January 10th this year. The maximum volume of mentions has been 902 for Sanofi-Aventis and 880 for Genzyme. Unsurprisingly, the volume values for the companies are highly correlated, because they were usually mentioned together. Before moving on, let's see what the spikes were about: if we look at news & blog articles from January 10th, we can see that Genzyme has revealed that the talks are continuing.

If we look at the sentiment graph, we see no clear pattern. The news about Genzyme are mostly positive. The news about Sanofi-Aventis have a slightly more negative trend, but still are positive in general. This is not surprising: we are expecting to have strong negative sentiment, when there are some really bad news (as the ones with Avastin and breast cancer), and it was not the case in the last month. We'll wait to see what the sentiment will be when the talks conclude - probably it will be mixed.

The next feature that we look at covers geolocation. The countries that were mentioned most often together are United States, and the European countries: France, UK, and Germany. Again, this is something that we would expect.

Looking at the diseases associated with Sanofi-Aventis and Genzyme, we see the ones that are addressed by their drugs: different types of cancer, multiple sclerosis, insomnia. A special mention regarding MS: Genzyme is working on a drug for this disease, which is in the clinical trial phase. The potential future value of this drug is one of the most important sources of disagreement between the two companies.

Finally, let's look at the background of the people who blogged or tweeted about this subject: most of them were observers (i.e. established bloggers or multi-author blogs), followed by patients, and doctors.

That's it for now. We will publish an update about this topic when the talks between Sanofi-Aventis and Genzyme reach a conclusion, although this might take a while.

Use of Avastin for breast cancer is limited in Europe, disapproved in the United States

On Thursday, December 16th, Roche's Avastin cancer drug suffered a double blow, in the European and US markets, regarding its use for breast cancer. The EMA's Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) decided that Avastin shouldn't be used with Sanofi-Aventis' Taxotere drug for treating breast cancer that has spread. The drug can be used in combination with the paclitaxel chemotherapy treatment, but not with an additional chemotherapy. Meanwhile, in the US, the FDA recommended against using Avastin for treating breast cancer, after four clinical trials showed no significant benefits to outweigh its many side effects.

Let's see how Avastin was viewed in social media on Thursday and Friday. First, let's look at the volume of mentions of Avastin. As you can see from the first chart, the number of mentions was several times higher than any other day of the past month. To be more precise, the volume grew from 219 mentions on Wednesday (Dec 15th), to 2452 on Thursday and even more to 2529 on Friday. On Saturday, the volume decreased to 770, but it was still the highest in the last month, except the previous two days.

Let's look at the sentiment surrounding the news about Avastin. Unsurprisingly, this has also been the lowest in the last month. We only take positive and negative mentions into account when calculating sentiment, and the score can be between -1 (only negative news) and 1 (only positive news). The sentiment on Avastin has decreased dramatically starting from Tuesday, when it was -0.33, to Friday, when it was -0.93 (405 negative mentions compared to 15 positive ones). Then, it started increasing again, reaching -0.57 on Sunday.

If we look at the source types mentioning Avastin on Thursday and Friday, the overwhelming majority is represented by Twitter (94.9%).

Also, if we look at the diseases associated with Avastin on Thursday and Friday, breast cancer has appeared more than 2000 times, while other diseases have less than 10 mentions.

Now, let's look at the background of Twitters users and bloggers that wrote about Avastin: 26 were doctors, 18 were observers, and 2 patients. This is a novel feature that we will explain in more detail in a later blog post, as we are still working to make it more compelling.

Finally, let's look at the volume and sentiment for Roche Holding, the company that markets Avastin, after buying Genentech last year. As you can see, the volume of Roche mentions almost double from 676 on Wednesday (Dec 15th), to 1277 next day on Thursday. However, the sentiment on Thursday was almost neutral, while on Friday it was mostly positive (28 positive mentions, compare to 18 negative).

In presenting these charts, we had the opportunity to give a glimpse about how Newistic works, and its ability to capture data about healthcare events. Please leave a comment if you have questions about any of the charts shown in this post.

The official history of Newistic

As I promised, I am back with a short history of Newistic, to give you a quick background about us.

The roots of Newistic can be traced back to 2006, when Ovidiu and myself (Horatiu) started working on a news aggregator as a student research project, trying to build something similar to Google News. We were both in our first undergraduate year and, even if we have been classmates for 11 years during primary school, we were studying in different countries: the Netherlands, and Romania, respectively. At that point, Ovidiu had already exited from his first start-up, an online news portal, Playfuls.com. We both learned Java, and started developing a cool platform. During that summer we wrote a fully distributed, fail-safe distributed storage system. Later, we found out that similar systems have been already built. We started writing research papers that were later published. Also, we had the chance to hone our start-up skills by participating to ICUBE, a tech entrepreneurship competition, where we took 2nd place. We were awarded a trip to Boston and Silicon Valley, which gave us a taste of how real entrepreneurship looks like. We also had the chance to meet inspiring people. So, I can say that 2006 was a busy year.

In the following years, 2007-2009, our focus was on school and travelling. I spent 3 months studying in Ireland (2006), and graduated in 2008, starting a Master's at Imperial College London in the autumn of the same year. Ovidiu spent 6 months in Hong Kong on an internship (2008), and graduated in early 2009. He started a PhD at Lehigh University in the in September 2009. However, during this time we continued working on Newistic, adding features and rewriting some of the components. We learned a lot about developing a distributed, large scale platform as well as about solving text analysis challenges. We also participated to other competitions like YEurope (2007) and Knight NewsChallenge (2008), so we continued to improve our skills in that area.

In the summer of 2009, things started to heat up. We started working on a Romanian version of our news monitoring product, and we partnered with an online newspaper to offer them news about the candidates for the upcoming presidential elections in Romania. When I returned from London in October 2009 I started working full-time at Newistic. In parallel with the Romanian market, we focused on the European market, providing a text crawling andanalysis platform in several languages: English, France and German. After participating to Mini Seedcamp Prague in March 2010, and adding experienced entrepreneur Adrian Amariei as an advisor to our team, we took two important decisions in May 2010: focusing on a vertical - healthcare, and focusing on social media.

Since May 2010, recognizing the mainstream adoption of social media, and observing that the healthcare vertical was behind almost any other verticals in adopting it (due to regulations), we saw a big opportunity and decided to focus completely on social media and healthcare. Another strong reason for tackling a vertical was our belief that domain knowledge will help specialized tools become more compelling than the generic ones. During the summer, new features like Twitter and forum crawling were added, and a new widget-based web dashboard was built. After participating to Intel Challenge Eastern Europe in October and spending 4 weeks in London in November, we entered private beta in November 2010.

So here we are: at this very moment, we are concentrating on working with our beta customers, and on extending our technical and support team. We have a lot of interesting features in the pipeline, which we expect to reveal in the first months of 2011. And, yeah, I plan to be back to London next year.

Review of Newistic beta

Paul Grant from Creation Interactive gave a really nice description of the current Newistic product and some of our future plans.

I want to thank him for the article and urge you to read it, because it's better than anything we would have written ourselves.

And don't forget that we are looking for clients interested in testing the beta version of our product!

Welcome to our blog

Hello everyone,

Thanks for visiting our website and blog. This is our first post, so I'll try to keep it very short.

As you probably already know from our website, we are working on a social media & analytics platform for the healthcare industry. We just entered into private beta, and we expect to announce some interesting things soon.

Before we go on, let us introduce ourselves. I am Horatiu, one of the co-founders, and I will write regularly about us, our product, or anything interesting related to social media. Ovidiu, our other co-founder, will add technical bits from time to time (he says "Hello!"). Check the team page to find out more about us.

That's it for now. The next post will contain a short history of Newistic. If you want to introduce yourselves or tell us something, just leave a comment.