George Scan­gos went back to Wall Street, and came back 700 mil­lion pen­nies short.

Scan­gos’ vaunt­ed start­up Vir Biotech­nol­o­gy raised $143 mil­lion in an IPO they hoped would earn $150 mil­lion. Shares were priced at $20, the low-end of the $20-$22 tar­get.

Launched with back­ing from ARCH Ven­ture’s Robert Nelsen, Masayoshi Son’s Soft­Bank Vi­sion Fund, and the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion, the in­fec­tious dis­ease start­up was one of a new wave of well-re­sourced biotechs that emerged with deep enough cof­fers to pur­sue a full R&D line rather than slow­ly build their case by pick­ing off a sin­gle lead pro­gram.

By the time they were a year old, they had bagged $500 mil­lion in fi­nanc­ing and four aca­d­e­m­ic part­ner­ships,  agreed to two sep­a­rate deals worth more than $1 bil­lion apiece in po­ten­tial mile­stones, and land­ed a promi­nent ex-Bio­gen chief in Scan­gos as CEO.  They had lofty goals to match, aim­ing at such mar­quee and elu­sive dis­eases as HIV and hep B and tout­ing a feel-good “glob­al” busi­ness mod­el by which they would sell their drugs in coun­tries that could pay and let the Gates Foun­da­tion dis­trib­ute them in coun­tries that couldn’t.

The IPO promised in­vestors a peek in­to the de­tails and progress on those deals, while giv­ing Vir cash to fu­el their clin­i­cal tri­als.

Ev­i­dent­ly, the in­vestors were slight­ly un­der­whelmed.

The S-1 shows Vir had burned through $256 mil­lion and had $356.5 mil­lion on hand as of June. Pro­ceeds from the IPO are in­tend­ed to fund ear­ly tri­als for hep B can­di­dates VIR-2218 and VIR-3434, along with the flu vac­cine VIR-2482.  Fil­ings al­so showed their R&D deal with Al­ny­lam — ini­tial­ly an­nounced un­der its $1 bil­lion-plus max­i­mum pay­out — was worth on­ly $10 mil­lion up­front.

Be­fore the of­fer­ing, Nelsen owned the biggest chunk of the biotech at 27%, fol­lowed by the Soft­Bank Vi­sion Fund at 21%. Vir’s haul adds an­oth­er IPO dis­ap­point­ment for Soft­Bank, al­though it’s a gen­tle one com­pared to the CEO-top­pling We­Work quake. Vir is one of eight biotechs Soft­Bank is in­vest­ed in, in­clud­ing Vivek Ra­maswamy’s Roivant.

Scan­gos came to the com­pa­ny with a high-pro­file but less-than-flaw­less record. Al­though he helped make Tec­fidera a mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis block­buster at Bio­gen, he left the com­pa­ny in 2016 with a thin pipeline.

Since losing a controversial court case over orphan drug exclusivity last year, the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development has remained entirely silent on orphan exclusivity for any product approved since last November, leaving many sponsors in limbo on what to expect.

That silence means that for more than 70 orphan-designated indications for more than 60 products, OOPD has issued no public determination on the seven-year orphan exclusivity in the Orange Book, and no new listings of orphan exclusivity appear in OOPD’s searchable database, as highlighted recently by George O’Brien, a partner in Mayer Brown’s Washington, DC office.

Covid-19 trailblazer Pfizer has confirmed its commitment to a large expansion project on the Emerald Isle.

The New York-based company announced on Thursday that it will make a €1.2 billion ($1.26 billion) capital investment into its manufacturing site at Grange Castle in Dublin.

The expansion of the site marks Pfizer’s largest expansion investment in Ireland to date. The expansion includes the construction of a new facility on the premises as well as adding in more laboratory space and will ultimately double the capacity for “biological drug substance manufacturing” in the oncology and rare disease space as well as inflammation, immunology and internal medicines.

Wednesday afternoon, Gene editing company Intellia and eye disease company Iveric Bio announced that they had each raised $300 million by selling off some of their stocks. The two biotechs are the latest to raise money via public stock offerings, an increasingly popular tactic used by public companies as the industry falls back from its pandemic boom.

Intellia’s raise comes a few weeks after it posted an update on its hereditary angioedema program that uses CRISPR/Cas9 to directly edit the gene that makes the protein responsible for the attacks that occur with the disease. In that interim cut, Intellia showed that patients dosed with its one-time therapy became attack free (at least thus far) after an observation period of 16 weeks, with the longest patient remaining attack free for 10 months.