A biotech look­ing to treat skin dis­eases sent in word to the SEC that it wants to go pub­lic.

Az­i­tra joins a rel­a­tive­ly small group of biotechs seek­ing an IPO in the past few quar­ters, with on­ly a hand­ful go­ing pub­lic in re­cent mem­o­ry, in­clud­ing two on back-to-back Fri­days this month.

The biotech’s lead pro­gram is ATR-12, with a Phase Ib to start in the first half of this year for Nether­ton syn­drome, a rare au­to­so­mal dis­ease that is marked by in­flam­ma­tion, scal­ing, and red and de­hy­drat­ed skin that’s caused by mu­ta­tions in the SPINK5 gene. The com­pa­ny says there are about 20,000 pa­tients world­wide with the dis­ease and sees a $250 mil­lion peak sales op­por­tu­ni­ty. The tri­al is ex­pect­ed to read out in the first half of next year. The FDA has as­signed it pe­di­atric rare dis­ease des­ig­na­tion.

Fur­ther down the pipeline are ATR-04 for EGFR in­hibitor as­so­ci­at­ed rash (Phase Ib first half of next year) and ATR-01 for ichthyosis vul­garis (IND fil­ing in late 2024). An ear­ly-stage study test­ing ATR-04 in can­cer ther­a­py-as­so­ci­at­ed rash­es was sus­pend­ed in 2021, ac­cord­ing to a clin­i­cal tri­als data­base up­date. A tri­al in 2019 test­ed it as a cos­met­ic.

The Con­necti­cut biotech, found­ed in 2014, has pulled to­geth­er a li­brary of 1,500 bac­te­r­i­al strains to screen for ther­a­peu­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics.

Lead­ing the com­pa­ny is Fran­cis­co Sal­va, who co-found­ed Ac­er­ta Phar­ma, which sold to As­traZeneca for about $6 bil­lion in 2016. He al­so worked on com­pet­ing BTK in­hibitor mak­er Phar­ma­cyclics for a brief two-year pe­ri­od as cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment se­nior di­rec­tor from 2008 to 2010. Pri­or to join­ing Az­i­tra in 2021, he was chief ex­ec­u­tive of fi­brot­ic and in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­eases biotech Com­plexa, which “went out of busi­ness” in 2020, per a for­mer em­ploy­ee’s de­scrip­tion on LinkedIn.

Part­ners in­clude Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty, Yale, Jack­son Lab­o­ra­to­ry for Ge­nom­ic Med­i­cine and Fred Hutch. Az­i­tra al­so has a con­sumer health pro­gram in the works with Bay­er for over-the-counter cos­met­ic prod­ucts. The Big Phar­ma’s VC arm has al­so in­vest­ed $8 mil­lion in the com­pa­ny’s Se­ries B pre­ferred stock.

At the end of last year, Az­i­tra had work­ing cap­i­tal of $1.9 mil­lion and to­tal as­sets of $7.2 mil­lion, per the S1 fil­ing. KdT Ven­tures, Con­necti­cut In­no­va­tions, Bios Part­ners, God­frey Cap­i­tal and Pe­ter Thiel’s Break­out Labs have fi­nanced the biotech. With pro­ceeds from the pro­posed of­fer­ing, Az­i­tra thinks it could op­er­ate for an­oth­er 12 months. The biotech has 10 em­ploy­ees and full-time con­sul­tants, per the SEC pa­per­work.

When Vigil Neuroscience filed its IPO papers in late 2021, the biotech revealed that the FDA had just cleared its Phase I trial — but with a partial clinical hold that limited dosing to under a certain level.

More than a year later, the FDA has lifted the hold.

Vigil is now free to dose VGL101, an antibody targeting TREM2, at levels higher than 20 mg/kg in its ongoing and future clinical trials in patients with adult-onset leukoencephalopathy with axonal spheroids and pigmented glia (ALSP), an inherited condition that affects the brain and spinal cord.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.