Erik van den Berg AM-Phar­ma

Back in 2015, Pfiz­er put a spot­light on Dutch biotech AM-Phar­ma and its drug can­di­date for sep­sis-as­so­ci­at­ed acute kid­ney in­jury, an­te­ing up $87.5 mil­lion for a mi­nor­i­ty stake in ad­di­tion to an op­tion to gob­ble the whole op­er­a­tion up. The Phase II tri­al that the gi­ant part­ner had bet on end­ed up de­liv­er­ing a mixed win, and Pfiz­er walked away from the deal cit­ing “in­ter­nal strate­gic rea­sons” — leav­ing the small play­er on its own to pull off a large Phase III study and pon­der com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

A year and a half af­ter that da­ta read­out, AM-Phar­ma is go­ing for it. In lieu of one deep-pock­et­ed al­ly, it’s as­sem­bled a group of top-tier Eu­ro­pean in­vestors to back its fi­nal stretch in the clin­ic.

LSP and An­dera Part­ners co-led the €116 mil­lion ($133 mil­lion) round, join­ing found­ing in­vestor For­bion and oth­er ex­ist­ing sup­port­ers: Ys­ios Cap­i­tal, Kur­ma Part­ners, ID In­vest Part­ners, BB Pure­os Bioven­tures and Gilde Health­care.

The Phase III pro­gram will re­cruit 1,400 pa­tients across 12 coun­tries to test whether AM-Phar­ma’s re­com­bi­nant hu­man al­ka­line phos­phatase (re­cAP) can in­deed re­duce the mor­tal­i­ty rate due to kid­ney dam­age in­duced by the body’s over­whelm­ing re­sponse to in­fec­tions.

The 40% re­duc­tion not­ed in the pre­vi­ous Phase II was what gave van den Berg con­fi­dence de­spite the drug not hit­ting the pri­ma­ry end­point of im­prov­ing kid­ney func­tion in 7 days.

“Short term kid­ney func­tion im­prove­ment was re­al­ly more a de­sign for the Phase II study to be able to pick the most op­ti­mal dose,” he said. “It’s kind of a bio­mark­er if you like. For Phase III one has to choose hard clin­i­cal end­points, and the most pre­ferred end­point by the reg­u­la­tors is the mor­tal­i­ty in this set­ting.”

And it’s not hard to see why. With mil­lions of pa­tients suf­fer­ing from acute kid­ney in­jury each oth­er — half of which are as­so­ci­at­ed with sep­sis — and 700,000 deaths around the world an­nu­al­ly, mak­ing a dent in that would mean a block­buster op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Re­cAP works by de­phos­pho­ry­lat­ing sub­stances that can trig­ger the im­mune sys­tem in­to dev­as­tat­ing the kid­ney, thus dex­o­ti­fy­ing them and re­duc­ing the in­flam­ma­tion.

“From our in­ter­ac­tions with FDA and EMA last year, we just need to con­duct one sin­gle pos­i­tive piv­otal study to file for mar­ket ap­proval,” he tells me, adding that the drug has se­cured fast track des­ig­na­tion in the US.

He plans to bring the com­pa­ny’s head­count up from 15 to as many as 30 to com­plete the clin­i­cal work and per­haps be­gin lay­ing some ground­work for launch.

Fol­low­ing the fi­nanc­ing the board will al­so ex­pand, com­pris­ing Mar­ti­jn Klei­jwegt and Fe­lice Ver­duyn van Wee­gen from LSP, Raphael Wis­niews­ki from An­dera, Re­mi Droller from Kur­ma and Geert-Jan Mul­der from For­bion.

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

The biotech SPAC boom has gone almost hand-in-hand with the industry’s IPO gold rush, and this week saw more blank check companies hop aboard the train.

Leading the way is Perceptive Advisors’ fourth SPAC, appropriately named Arya Sciences Acquisition IV, which priced Friday morning after raising $130 million. And on top of that, new Ziopharm executive chair James Huang is launching his own SPAC with MSD Partners and Panacea Venture, filing S-1 paperwork Thursday with plans to raise $200 million.

Not even one month after Big Pharma took notice of Artiva when Merck signed a collaboration worth nearly $2 billion in milestones, the off-the-shelf NK cell biotech already has its next big fundraise.

Artiva returns from the venture well Friday with a $120 million Series B round, money they will use to get their first program into the clinic and to file INDs for another two candidates. The raise marks the latest development in a rapidly expanding footprint for Artiva, which, in addition to the Merck deal last month, has now raised almost $200 million since its Series A last June.