Just a few days af­ter Ab­b­Vie went all in on a Covid-19 an­ti­body, its part­ner has of­fi­cial­ly wrapped its IPO.

Jing­song Wang

List­ing on the Hong Kong Stock Ex­change, Har­bour Bio­Med has raised $221 mil­lion with help from nine cor­ner­stone in­vestors: Black­Rock Fund, HBM Health­care, Hill­house Cap­i­tal, Hud­son Bay Cap­i­tal, Oc­ta­gon In­vest­ments, An­lan Fund, Leg­end Cap­i­tal, Or­biMed and 3W Cap­i­tal.

The new in­jec­tion adds to over $300 mil­lion the com­pa­ny — which has of­fices in both Suzhou, Chi­na and Cam­bridge, MA — has ac­crued in four years.

With a fo­cus on im­munol­o­gy and on­col­o­gy, Har­bour Bio­Med has said it will main­ly in­vest the pro­ceeds on three an­chor as­sets: ba­to­climab, the an­ti­body hit­ting the neona­tal Fc re­cep­tor for a range of au­toim­mune and in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­or­ders; tan­fan­er­cept, a TNF-α drug for dry eye dis­ease; and HBM4003, a CT­LA4 in­hibitor.

The first two are in reg­is­tra­tional tri­als while the third is just en­ter­ing the clin­ic.

But the biggest val­i­da­tion of its an­ti­body dis­cov­ery plat­form might have come ear­li­er this year with 47D11, a pro­gram orig­i­nal­ly de­vel­oped for SARS-CoV-1. Since it tar­gets a re­gion on the spike pro­tein that’s con­served on SARS-CoV-2, CEO Jing­song Wang told End­points News, Har­bour Bio­Med, the Nether­lands’ Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty and Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter worked to­geth­er to test it pre­clin­i­cal­ly for the new coro­n­avirus.

Ab­b­Vie jumped on board in June, help­ing boot up a small Phase I tri­al in the US that start­ed just last week. On Mon­day the phar­ma gi­ant ex­er­cised its op­tion to li­cense the whole pro­gram for de­vel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

The fate of the pro­gram will test Har­bour’s promis­es to de­liv­er glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive next-gen an­ti­body drugs — many of which are aimed at the same tar­gets as es­tab­lished ther­a­pies — through a com­bi­na­tion of li­cens­ing and in-house re­search.

Little capsules of peanut powder drove Nestlé’s $2.6 billion buyout of Aimmune. Now, with $40 million in new funding, a fledgling biotech is promising to bring a more sophisticated version of that protein therapy that can go much, much further.

Ukko’s goal is two-pronged — with the initial products spanning therapeutic and food — but it’s grounded in the same protein engineering platform, co-founder and CEO Anat Binur told Endpoints News.

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Years after co-founding SINE-focused Karyopharm and stirring up controversy at MD Anderson, Ronald DePinho is helping uncloak a new biotech targeting solute carrier transporter proteins — and Karyopharm’s former head of chemistry is leading the charge.

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