The pan­dem­ic stock mar­ket has proven fruit­ful for vir­tu­al­ly any type of biotech. Now a 7-year-old cell ther­a­py start­up will see how much it can yield for a com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in fight­ing virus­es.

AlloVir, a com­pa­ny that un­til 2019 large­ly lived off grant mon­ey, has filed for a $100 mil­lion IPO to back its line of off-the-shelf, virus-fight­ing T cells. Al­though in nor­mal cir­cum­stances, $100 mil­lion could be a sol­id re­turn for a biotech that got its first ma­jor round of fund­ing on­ly last year, we’ll have to wait to see how much the com­pa­ny ul­ti­mate­ly earns. As Covid-19 has sent in­vestor mon­ey scur­ry­ing to al­most any­one in drug de­vel­op­ment, every sin­gle biotech to go pub­lic this year has prized above their mid­point or up­sized their of­fer­ing, ac­cord­ing to Re­nais­sance Cap­i­tal, some­times dra­mat­i­cal­ly so.

Found­ed in 2013 out of Bay­lor Col­lege of Med­i­cine’s Cen­ter for Cell and Gene Ther­a­py, AlloVir emerged with a splash last year af­ter ex-Alex­ion chief David Hal­lal made it the first port­fo­lio com­pa­ny for El­e­vate­Bio, his start­up fo­cused on ac­cel­er­at­ing in­no­v­a­tive cell and gene ther­a­pies. Hal­lal led a $120 mil­lion round for the biotech and be­came its CEO.

Ann Leen

The idea be­hind AlloVir is to cre­ate what CSO Ann Leen has called “an im­mune sys­tem in a dish.” T cells are ex­tract­ed from healthy vol­un­teers, ex­pand­ed in the lab, and then giv­en to im­muno-com­pro­mised pa­tients to help them fend off in­fec­tions they would oth­er­wise not be able to. Their pro­grams span 12 dif­fer­ent virus­es, and their lead can­di­date Vi­ra­lym-M is meant to pro­tect against BK virus, cy­tomegalovirus, ade­n­ovirus, Ep­stein-Barr virus, and hu­man her­pesvirus.

The com­pa­ny has al­ready test­ed Vi­ra­lym-M in one tri­al on pa­tients who were im­mune-com­pro­mised from a stem cell trans­plant, and re­port­ed a “93% clin­i­cal re­sponse rate.” The IPO pro­ceeds will help push that drug through Phase II and Phase III.

It will al­so help ad­vance four oth­er can­di­dates for oth­er virus­es, in­clud­ing — be­cause no biotech with an­tivi­ral tech­nol­o­gy would be com­plete with­out one now — a SARS-CoV-2 pro­gram that is sup­posed to en­ter a proof-of-con­cept study lat­er this year.

The old AveXis team is moving quickly in Dallas.

Three months ago, they launched Taysha with $30 million in Series A funding and a pipeline of gene therapies out of UT Southwestern. Now, they’ve announced an oversubscribed $95 million Series B. And the biotech is declining all interview requests on the news, the kind of broad silence that can indicate an IPO is in the pipeline.

Biotechs, including those relatively fresh off launch, have been going public at a frenzy since the pandemic began. Investors have showed a willingness to put upwards of $200 million to companies that have yet to bring a drug into the clinic. Still, if Taysha were to go public in the near future, it would be perhaps the shortest path from launch to IPO in recent biotech memory.

Boston, MA-based startup GentiBio landed a $20 million seed fund from three investors to dive into engineered regulatory T cell (EngTreg) development.

Marquee investors OrbiMed, Novartis Venture Fund and RA Capital Management have backed GentiBio’s mission to develop EngTregs for the treatment of autoimmune, alloimmune, autoinflammatory, and allergic diseases. Unlike other companies studying treatments using a patient’s own Tregs, GentiBio plans to make use of CD4+ immune cells, found in the blood.

Longtime stem cell player ViaCyte has teamed up with a materials science company in an effort to solve immunosuppression challenges and advance its type 1 diabetes treatments.

Expanding on an existing collaboration, ViaCyte and W.L. Gore have agreed to combine the biotech’s PEC-Encap candidate with a Gore-produced membrane in what they hope will eliminate the need for immunosuppressive drugs. Such treatments have created foreign body responses in the past, and stamping these reactions out is the main goal, ViaCyte CEO Paul Laikind said.

Myovant is getting ready to roll out its commercial operations to back relugolix, now under FDA review for prostate cancer.

The startup has added a fresh $200 million in support from Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, which controls a majority of the stock $MYOV. Sumitomo is handing the cash over as a loan, bringing its total to $600 million. Myovant — which is gearing up for a showdown with AbbVie — has also filed an NDA to sell relugolix for uterine fibroids and recently posted positive late-stage data for endometriosis.