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It's Monday, December 16th, 2019. Please enjoy ARK's weekly newsletter curated by our thematic analysts and designed to keep you engaged with disruptive innovation. Have a wonderful day!

 

The Porsche Taycan Comes Up Short on Range

Follow Sam on Twitter @skorusARK

 

Porsche touted a range of up to 280 miles when it unveiled the Taycan, but this past week the EPA declared that its range was only 201 miles. Even if it had lived up to the promised range, the Taycan’s drivetrain efficiency would have been inferior to that of Tesla’s Model S. Though Tesla critics claim Musk overpromises, the data suggests otherwise. As shown below, the Model 3 outperforms what was announced at its product unveiling.

Why is the EPA’s estimated range so far below Porsche’s? ARK debated and discussed three possibilities:

  1. Porsche is limiting the battery to 80% of total capacity, as the last 20% of a charge accelerates its rate of degradation. Never having manufactured an EV and uncertain of the battery’s lifespan, Porsche could have made an exceedingly conservative decision.
  2. The efficiency of Porsche’s drivetrain is much worse than expected.
  3. With its two-speed transmission, the Taycan is hyper-optimized for quick acceleration and sustained top speeds, making day to day driving around town inefficient.

Whatever the reason, the outcome is disappointing and could hurt the Taycan’s sales potential.

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3D Printing Parts Are Taking Flight 

Follow Tasha on Twitter @TashaARK

 

Recently, Wired highlighted that the Air Force is 3D printing replacement parts at a cost almost 30X less than traditional manufacturing methods. 3D printing is suited for aerospace applications because it reduces the costs to manufacture highly complex, low volume parts. It reduces not only the weight of parts, lowering fuel costs, but also the number of parts and manufacturing steps, lowering labor costs and adding to the structural integrity of engines and other mission critical components.

 

As a result, the number of aerospace parts submitting to 3D printing should increase over time. In 2013, GE designed a 3D printed fuel nozzle for the LEAP jet engine that combined 20 parts into one and lowered its weight by 25%. In 2015, the LEAP entered production, each of its engines requiring 19 nozzles. In 2019, GE announced that each GE9x engine included 300 3D printed parts, reducing its weight, part count, and material costs. Extrapolating this trend and as shown below, ARK estimates that 4,000 parts in a jet engine could be 3D printed in five years, and that ultimately 30% of the 200,000 parts in a typical engine will be 3D printed, with a significant impact on the 15-20% gross margin structure of companies like Boeing and Airbus.

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Twitter Announces Bluesky, the Real Web 3.0 Vision? 

Follow Yassine on Twitter @yassineARK

 

Jack Dorsey announced the launch of Bluesky, a Twitter-funded independent team of architects, engineers, and designers with the goal of developing an open and decentralized standard for social media. If successful, Bluesky will steer the internet back to its open source and decentralized founding principles.

 

In this seminal piece, which Jack Dorsey referenced in the announcement, Michael Masnick notes, “The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. In the past few decades, however, rather than building new protocols, the internet has grown up around controlled platforms that are privately owned. These can function in ways that appear similar to the earlier protocols, but they are controlled by a single entity.”

 

These centralized “solutions” are facing significant challenges today, as they implement global policies to address abusive behavior and false or misleading information and face criticism over the proprietary algorithms that spark vicious attacks and outrage at the expense of healthy dialogue.With Bluesky Jack seems to be acknowledging that the open source movement is better suited to address these challenges.

 

Like Square’s efforts to fund open source Bitcoin development through Square Crypto, Twitter is tasking the Bluesky team either to advance an existing decentralized standard or to create a new one, either of which will be a client of.

Invitae’s Acquisition of Singular Bio Furthers its Vertical Integration

Follow Simon on Twitter @sbarnettARK

 

Veracyte (VCYT) and Invitae (NVTA) are integrating a technique called molecular counting into their diagnostic workflows. Scientists use “counting” to quantify the number of DNA or RNA molecules in a patient sample, crucial for applications like non-invasive prenatal screening (NIPS) and liquid biopsies (LBs). ARK believes that Veracyte’s acquisition of NanoString’s (NSTG) nCounter FLEX platform is part of its international expansion strategy while Invitae’s purchase of Singular Bio, a firm with proprietary counting technology, should lower its cost of goods sold and challenge Illumina’s (ILMN) control over sequencing costs.

 

Lab technicians can count molecules by first attaching fluorescent probes to specific regions of DNA and then analyzing the optical data. Bioinformaticians use the count data to resolve systematic errors in NIPS and LB test results. While cruder than sequencing, counting technology offers a cost advantage for some diagnostic applications. With Singular Bio’s counting platform, Invitae should be able to increase turnaround times in its NIPT business and boost margins without sacrificing clinical-grade accuracy. Meanwhile, in the absence of similar moves toward vertical integration, its molecular diagnostic testing competitors could be more hostage to Illumina’s pricing markups.

Adoptive Cell Therapy Expands with New Technologies 

Follow Manisha on Twitter @msamyARK

 

CAR-T treatment of B cell malignancies can be complicated by resistance and relapse, challenges that tuning cell cytotoxicity can address in a compelling way. Dufva et al delineates the combinations of small molecule chemistry and CRISPR loss-of-function screens that might be able to control CAR-T cell cytotoxicity. Small molecule drugs can enhance or suppress CAR-T cell cytotoxicity. Enhancing cytotoxicity in tumor cells with such combination therapies might be able to combat resistance and relapse. Moreover, a drug that suppresses T-cell cytotoxicity also might be able to address T cell autoimmune disorders.

 

Suppressors of CAR-T cell cytotoxicity like dasatinib are on-off switches that attempt to control CAR-T cell activation. First generation CAR-Ts like Kymriah and Yescarta have not been able to control T-cell based side-effects like cytotoxic release syndrome (CRS). Next generation CAR-Ts should be just as efficacious but safer.

In Other Innovation News

Global TV Advertising Has Suffered its Worst Drop Since 2009
In the US, although linear TV viewership has declined steadily since 2014, advertisers have continued to pour money into the flailing format, until now. According to research firm Magna Global, global television advertising is expected to drop 4% this year, the most significant decline since the global financial crisis in 2009.

 

 

Robinhood Enables Trading of Fractional Shares

On Thursday, Robinhood announced that it will accommodate the trading of fractional shares. During the past six years, Robinhood has been disrupting the traditional brokerage industry with innovative, transparent, and competitively priced products. During the past several months, however, new competitors like Square and SoFi and incumbents like Charles Schwab and Interactive Brokers have offered fractional share trading, forcing Robinhood to follow instead of leading the disruption of traditional financial services.


ARK's statements are not an endorsement of any company or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. For a list of all purchases and sales made by ARK for client accounts during the past year that could be considered by the SEC as recommendations, click here. It should not be assumed that recommendations made in the future will be profitable or will equal the performance of the securities in this list. For full disclosures, click here.


 

 

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