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.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.