It’s been heady for biotechs break­ing in­to a pan­dem­ic stock mar­ket: $233 mil­lion for ADC Ther­a­peu­tics, $165 mil­lion for Zen­tal­is, and $120 mil­lion for ORIC. Now a com­pa­ny that emerged from stealth just 8 months ago — and is now run­ning low on cash — is try­ing to get in on the 9-fig­ure game.

South San Fran­cis­co-based Ap­plied Mol­e­c­u­lar Trans­port has filed for a $100 mil­lion IPO. Found­ed and led by long­time life sci­ences con­sul­tant Tahir Mah­mood, the com­pa­ny builds oral drugs around a car­ri­er mol­e­cule that can cross pro­tec­tive lin­ings in­to the im­mune-cell heavy ar­eas of the gut. They de­buted in Sep­tem­ber, af­ter they be­gan dos­ing Phase I for their lead pro­gram, an ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis drug that re­cent­ly com­plet­ed ear­ly test­ing in East­ern Eu­rope.

Tahir Mah­mood

That drug, AMT-101, is an IL-10 ag­o­nist that is de­signed to turn down in­flam­ma­tion in au­toim­mune dis­or­ders, in­clud­ing ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis but al­so pou­ch­i­tis and rheuma­toid arthri­tis. The IPO, the com­pa­ny said, will bankroll both Phase II tri­als for AMT-101 that they plan to be­gin this year, and a Phase I tri­al for AMT-126, an IL-22 ag­o­nist be­ing de­vel­oped for dis­eases that are re­lat­ed to bar­ri­er func­tion — i.e. dis­eases that sci­en­tists be­lieve in­volve breach­es in the cell lin­ing of the gut, such as in­flam­ma­to­ry bow­el dis­ease.

The swift IPO arose at least part­ly out of a sober look at their fi­nan­cials, with man­age­ment con­clud­ing at the end of Q1 that there “was sub­stan­tial doubt about our abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue as a go­ing con­cern” for the fol­low­ing year.

Ap­plied Mol­e­c­u­lar Trans­port was ini­tial­ly found­ed in 2010, as Ap­plied Mol­e­c­u­lar Trans­port, LLC. But in 2016, Ap­plied Mol­e­c­u­lar Trans­port, LLC be­came a whol­ly owned sub­sidiary of a new en­ti­ty — Ap­plied Mol­e­c­u­lar Trans­port Inc. Since then, the com­pa­ny has qui­et­ly raised $105.6 mil­lion in three sep­a­rate rounds: A $32.8 mil­lion Se­ries A in 2016, a $30.9 mil­lion Se­ries B in 2018, and a $41.9 mil­lion Se­ries C in 2019.

The com­pa­ny, though, burned through over $15 mil­lion in Q1 — $10 mil­lion more than they burned through in Q1 2019, when they were still a pre­clin­i­cal com­pa­ny — and was left with just $16 mil­lion left in the tank.

It’s time for a new FDA commissioner to come on board, a rite of passage for Joe Biden’s administration that should help seal the new president’s rep on seeking out the experts to lead the government over the next 4 years.

As of now, the competition for the top job appears to have narrowed down to 2 people: The longtime CDER chief Janet Woodcock and Joshua Sharfstein, the former principal deputy at the FDA under Peggy Hamburg. Both were appointed by Barack Obama.

Before the advent of CAR-T, the term cell therapy conjured up very different images. Sure, there were cancer immunotherapies like Dendreon’s Provenge, but more common were the various flavors of stem cell therapies and cell transplantation.

None of that has gone away, even if they’ve been nudged out of the spotlight — and a little biotech has garnered $54 million (£40 million) to show that both the old and new ideas of cell (and gene) therapy can mesh together to form a special breed of platform company.