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.

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all current vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

The vote marks an effort to clear up confusion around varying formulations and dosing schedules for current primary series and booster vaccines, as well as “get closer to the strains that are circulating,” according to committee member Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The CDMO arm of one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates has posted its year-end results and plans for 2023, which include new construction.

Samsung Biologics netted north of KRW 3 trillion ($2.4 billion) in 2022 revenue and an operating profit of KRW 983.6 billion ($799 million), which the company touted on Friday as “record-high earnings.” The revenue boost was 55% compared to 2021.

Novartis’ sickle cell drug, approved in 2019 and branded as Adakveo, has failed an ongoing Phase III, according to preliminary results.

The Swiss pharma giant unveiled early data from the ongoing STAND Phase III study on Friday, saying that crizanlizumab showed no statistically significant difference between the drug at two different dose levels compared to placebo in annualized rates of vaso-occlusive crises that lead to a healthcare visit over the first year since being randomized into the trial.