Near­ly a year ago, as the pan­dem­ic en­croached and the stock mar­ket cratered, Flag­ship and ARCH Ven­ture an­nounced three mega-funds worth a com­bined $2.6 bil­lion. They want­ed, ARCH’s Bob Nelsen said, to re­store con­fi­dence “that there was mon­ey out there and a lot of it” to in­vest in biotech.

Since then, the stock mar­ket has re­turned — al­most fright­en­ing­ly so — and Nelsen has kept rais­ing and spend­ing cash. On Thurs­day, he an­nounced a new fund, worth $1.85 bil­lion. It’s the largest pot yet for a VC fa­mous for its deep pock­ets.

This time, he said, there’s no mes­sage oth­er than what they’ve been say­ing for years.

“It’s just a con­tin­ued con­fi­dence in ba­sic sci­ence, and in­no­va­tion that’s hap­pen­ing in health­care; it’s re­al­ly a rev­o­lu­tion­ary time,” he told End­points News. It’s “keep­ing your head down and con­tin­u­ing to do what you do.”

His­tor­i­cal­ly, ARCH has been known for back­ing huge plays with record in­vest­ments, most re­cent­ly launch­ing Re­silience with $800 mil­lion and a plan to re­think how all bi­o­log­ic drugs are made. An­oth­er ma­jor bet, the in­fec­tious dis­ease start­up Vir, may yet play a ma­jor role in the pan­dem­ic, lead­ing one of the ma­jor ef­forts to de­vel­op a neu­tral­iz­ing an­ti­body for Covid-19.

In an­nounc­ing the new fund, Nelsen ticked off a range of ar­eas the firm will look to pur­sue, most of which ARCH has pre­vi­ous­ly pushed for­ward, in­clud­ing gene edit­ing and cell ther­a­py.

“Men­tal health is at the top of my mind,” he said.

ARCH has played a key role in pre­vi­ous men­tal health biotechs, most no­tably back­ing Sage Ther­a­peu­tics and Karuna. Nelsen said they may al­so in­vest in ap­proach­es to the is­sue out­side drug de­vel­op­ment, back­ing ef­forts in con­sumer health and health tech.

Al­though known for its huge plays, ARCH al­so hands out about 20 so-called “poor” deals that can range as low as $50,000 and ei­ther pro­vide seed cash for a par­tic­u­lar idea or help feed in­to a larg­er com­pa­ny. Both Vir and Re­silience, for ex­am­ple, com­bined mul­ti­ple small­er com­pa­nies in­to a large one, which then gar­nered sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment.

Not all those in­vest­ments, though, have worked out. Last year, Nelsen stepped away from the board of Uni­ty Biotech­nol­o­gy, an an­ti-ag­ing start­up that at­tract­ed sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment but failed a ma­jor tri­al last year. It’s at least the sec­ond ma­jor set­back he’s seen in an an­ti-ag­ing play, af­ter a late 90s, ear­ly 2000s bet on Cyn­thia Keny­on’s Elixir Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals went un­der.

Still, ARCH in­clud­ed it on a list of po­ten­tial ar­eas for the new fund, and Nelsen said he hasn’t lost faith. They’re con­tin­u­ing to mon­i­tor the field, he said.

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put some pigs on a plane and fly them from Ohio to North Carolina that day. A motorcyclist had gotten into a horrific crash, the doctor explained. He believed the pigs’ livers, sutured onto the patient’s skin like an external filter, might be able to tide the young man over until a donor liver became available.

Ocular Therapeutix $OCUL has had its ups and downs in the 7 years since it went public. Friday was one of those down days.

The Bedford, MA-based biotech reported that its lead experimental eye drug, OTX-CSI (cyclosporine intracanalicular insert), failed a Phase II trial for dry eye disease. And the stock experienced one of its periodic meltdowns, dropping more than 30% ahead of the bell.

The therapy flat failed the primary endpoint: increased tear production at 12 weeks as measured by the Schirmer’s Test compared to the vehicle control group. And while investigators called out an improvement from baseline in “signs of dry eye disease as measured by total corneal fluorescein staining (CFS) and symptoms of dry eye disease as measured by the visual analogue scale (VAS) eye dryness in subjects treated with the OTX-CSI insert,” it wasn’t statistically significant.

Pfizer will present its case to the FDA’s vaccine adcomm next week, seeking authorization for a lower-dose version of its Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 through 12, which the Biden administration said will likely begin rolling out early next month.

Two primary doses of the 10 µg vaccine (the dose for those ages 12 and up is 30 μg) given 3 weeks apart in this group of children “have shown a favorable safety and tolerability profile, robust immune responses against all variants of concern including Delta, and vaccine efficacy of 90.7% against laboratory-confirmed symptomatic COVID-19,” the company said in briefing documents ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.