Disclosure
We are short shares of Zafgen, Inc. Please click here to read full disclosures.
Zafgen is a biopharmaceutical company on the brink of extinction. From its founding in 2005, Zafgen’s “big idea,” in the words of one piece of early press coverage, was to “fight fat by cutting off its blood supply.” After licensing a drug called beloranib that was originally designed to inhibit angiogenesis (the development of new blood vessels) in order to treat cancer, Zafgen ultimately focused its development efforts on Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare genetic disorder in which a specific group of genes is missing or unexpressed, leading to an array of problems, including obesity and hyperphagia (extreme over-eating and food-seeking)…