→ A herd of up­start biotechs will look to Wall Street for some ma­jor wind­falls this week as a burst of new of­fer­ings con­tin­ues to feed cash in­to the R&D sys­tem. To­day we learned that Bridge­Bio will look to raise in the neigh­bor­hood of $225 mil­lion by of­fer­ing 15 mil­lion shares for $14 to $16 each. And they have a string of joint bookrun­ners: J.P. Mor­gan, Gold­man Sachs, Jef­feries, SVB Leerink, KKR, Piper Jaf­fray, Mizuho Se­cu­ri­ties, BMO Cap­i­tal Mar­kets and Ray­mond James. If suc­cess­ful, Bridge­Bio will emerge with a mar­ket cap of around $1.7 bil­lion. There are 5 biotechs look­ing to IPO this week, in­clud­ing Akero and Pre­vail.

→ Rockville, MD-based CASI Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals has in-li­censed an an­ti-CD19 T cell ther­a­py from Chi­na’s Ju­ven­tas. CASI is mak­ing an $11.6 mil­lion in­vest­ment in Ju­ven­tas in lieu of an up­front pay­ment. They’ll joint­ly con­tin­ue the de­vel­op­ment work.

→ Flex Phar­ma is hav­ing a lit­tle bit of trou­ble in ex­e­cut­ing its re­verse merg­er deal with Salarius Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals. The failed biotech $FLKS says it needs to see more votes cast by share­hold­ers af­ter fail­ing to achieve a quo­rum — in per­son or proxy — at a spe­cial meet­ing. Its be­lea­guered shares dropped 24% to a mere 49 cents in pre-mar­ket trad­ing on Mon­day.

→ Ar­bu­tus Bio­phar­ma tapped William Col­lier as its next pres­i­dent and CEO. Col­lier suc­ceeds Mark Mur­ray, who is re­tir­ing on June 23. Col­lier has had over 30 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try. He served as pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er, North Amer­i­ca at Vi­iV Health­care, in ad­di­tion to a stint at GSK $GSK as well. 

→ Med­ical ge­net­ics com­pa­ny, In­vi­tae Cor­po­ra­tion, is set to ac­quire Sin­gu­lar Bio to help in­crease ac­cess to ge­net­ic screen­ing in ear­ly preg­nan­cy. Sin­gu­lar Bio is “a pri­vate­ly held com­pa­ny de­vel­op­ing sin­gle mol­e­cule de­tec­tion tech­nol­o­gy that en­ables low­er costs and ex­pand­ed use of high-qual­i­ty, cell-free nu­cle­ic acid analy­sis, ini­tial­ly for ap­pli­ca­tion in non-in­va­sive pre­na­tal screen­ing (NIPS).”

→ In­cyte $IN­CY on Sat­ur­day pre­sent­ed 24-week re­sults from a mid-stage study of its JAK in­hibitor rux­oli­tinib, which showed the drug met the main goal of in­duc­ing ≥50% im­prove­ment in the fa­cial vi­tili­go. “This 24-week in­ter­val was the first part of a 3-part, 104-week study, and await 52- and 104-week da­ta to con­firm the safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy seen this week­end,” Cred­it Su­isse an­a­lysts wrote in a note. 

→ Calithera $CALA on Mon­day broke out da­ta from a mid-stage study test­ing its glu­t­a­m­i­nase in­hibitor, tela­gle­na­s­tat, in com­bi­na­tion with chemother­a­py everolimus. The tela­gle­na­s­tat com­bi­na­tion achieved a  me­di­an pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival (mPFS) of 3.8 months, while everolimus-treat­ed pa­tients ex­pe­ri­enced mPFS of 1.9 months. “While the top-line da­ta are en­cour­ag­ing, they do ap­pear to have de­te­ri­o­rat­ed vs. ear­li­er Phase I re­sults,” SVB Leerink an­a­lysts wrote in a note. 

→ A 15-month long sweep­ing in­ter­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion en­com­pass­ing more than a mil­lion doc­u­ments, thou­sands of hours of se­cret video sur­veil­lance — in­stalled un­der the aus­pices of for­mer CEO Park­er “Pe­te” Pe­tit — and over 80 wit­ness­es, paint­ed a sor­did pic­ture of the scan­dalous past of the wound care com­pa­ny MiMedx in May. Ear­li­er this month, MiMedx begged its share­hold­ers not to fall for ma­ligned Pe­tit’s bid to re­turn to the com­pa­ny’s board, along with two of his busi­ness as­so­ciates. A pre­lim­i­nary vote count sug­gests stock­hold­ers have lis­tened, the com­pa­ny said on Mon­day.

It’s official. Memorial Sloan Kettering has picked a brain cancer expert as its new physician-in-chief and CMO, replacing José Baselga, who left under a cloud after being singled out by The New York Times and ProPublica for failing to properly air his lucrative industry ties.

His replacement, who now will be in charge of MSK’s cutting-edge research work as well as the cancer care delivered by hundreds of practitioners, is Lisa M. DeAngelis. DeAngelis had been chair of the neurology department and co-founder of MSK’s brain tumor center and was moved in to the acting CMO role in the wake of Baselga’s departure.

More than two years ago Ritter Pharmaceuticals managed to find enough silver lining in its Phase IIb/III study — after missing the top-line mark — to propel its lactose intolerance toward a confirmatory trial. But as it turned out, the enthusiasm only set the biotech and its investors up to be sorely disappointed.

This time around there’s little left to salvage. Not only did RP-G28 fail to beat placebo in reducing lactose intolerance symptoms, patients in the treatment group actually averaged a smaller improvement. On a composite score measuring symptoms like abdominal pain, cramping, bloating and gas, patients given the drug had a mean reduction of 3.159 while the placebo cohort saw a 3.420 drop on average (one-sided p-value = 0.0106).

An early-stage update on Adverum Biotechnologies’ intravitreal gene therapy has triggered investor concern, after patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) saw their vision deteriorate, despite signs that the treatment is improving retinal anatomy.

Adverum, on Wednesday, unveiled 24-week data from the OPTIC trial of its experimental therapy, ADVM-022, in six patients who have been administered with one dose of the therapy. On average, patients in the trial had severe disease with an average of 6.2 anti-VEGF injections in the eight months prior to screening and an average annualized injection frequency of 9.3 injections.

Too often, Alex Arfaei arrived too late. 

An analyst at BMO Capital Markets, he’d meet with biotech or pharmaceutical heads for their IPO or secondary funding and his brain, trained on a biology degree and six years at Merck and Endo, would spring with questions: Why this biomarker? Why this design? Why not this endpoint? Not that he could do anything about it. These execs were coming for clinical money; their decisions had been made and finalized long ago.

In the first of what it hopes will be a couple of major regulatory milestones for its new drug, Ardelyx has bagged an FDA approval to market Ibsrela (tenapanor) for irritable bowel syndrome.

The drug’s first application will be for IBS with constipation (IBS-C), inhibiting sodium-hydrogen exchanger NHE3 in the GI tract in such a way as to increase bowel movements and decrease abdominal pain. This comes on the heels of two successful Phase III trials.