Just as ex­pect­ed, Check­mate’s $85 mil­lion ven­ture raise a few weeks ago was a pre­quel to the lat­est biotech IPO to hit the queue on Wall Street.

The com­pa­ny, found­ed by Check­mate CSO Art Krieg, pen­ciled in a $75 mil­lion raise this time, but like­ly has its sights set on a much larg­er sum — in keep­ing with the up­siz­ing now char­ac­ter­is­tic of the biotech class.

Now in mid-stage de­vel­op­ment af­ter a 5-year lead­up, the com­pa­ny is hy­per-fo­cused on one drug: CMP-001, which con­tains a CpG-A oligonu­cleotide that ac­ti­vates the TLR9 path­way to kick up an in­nate im­mune re­sponse to can­cer.

Krieg, who helped blaze the path­way, be­lieves that in­ject­ing the drug in­to a tu­mor will trig­ger a new T cell at­tack against that and oth­er tu­mors in the body, shift­ing the tu­mor mi­croen­vi­ron­ment in a way that ac­ti­vates the im­mune sys­tem. The com­pa­ny’s ap­proach is to part­ner up with a PD-1 — in this case, Op­di­vo and Keytru­da — and set out to prove that they can suc­cess­ful­ly treat a sig­nif­i­cant mi­nor­i­ty of pa­tients who didn’t re­spond to the first round of check­point ther­a­py.

Bar­ry Labinger Check­mate

In a tri­al, re­searchers re­port­ed a 25% over­all re­sponse rate, though Check­mate beefed that up to 28% by in­clud­ing post-pro­gres­sion re­spon­ders in the S-1. They al­so backed an­oth­er Phase III that tried the drug on first-line melanoma pa­tients. And they’ll need to run an­oth­er com­bo tri­al to take a full dataset to the FDA.

Krieg has kept 5.6% of the shares in the com­pa­ny, which is helmed by CEO Bar­ry Labinger. Both earned a to­tal of a lit­tle more than $500,000 last year, based on in­come large­ly de­rived from their salaries.

Sofinno­va and ven­Bio are the 2 big in­vestors here, each with 21.1% of the eq­ui­ty, fol­lowed by No­vo Hold­ings at 10.2% and Lon­gi­tude Ven­ture Part­ners at 8.9%.

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

Novartis’ sickle cell drug, approved in 2019 and branded as Adakveo, has failed an ongoing Phase III, according to preliminary results.

The Swiss pharma giant unveiled early data from the ongoing STAND Phase III study on Friday, saying that crizanlizumab showed no statistically significant difference between the drug at two different dose levels compared to placebo in annualized rates of vaso-occlusive crises that lead to a healthcare visit over the first year since being randomized into the trial.

Merck’s blockbuster cancer treatment Keytruda has been handed another indication by the FDA.

The US regulator announced on Thursday that it has approved Keytruda to serve as an adjuvant treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which is its fifth indication in NSCLC and 34th indication overall.

According to a Merck release, the approval is based on data from a Phase III trial, dubbed Keynote-091, which measured disease-free survival in patients who received chemotherapy following surgery. The data from Merck displayed that Keytruda cut down on the risk of disease recurrence or death by 27% versus placebo.

J&J and Legend Biotech’s next step in turning their CAR-T therapy Carvykti into a potential megablockbuster has succeeded, the companies said Friday.

Carvykti achieved the primary endpoint — progression-free survival — in an open-label Phase III study testing the treatment in second- to fourth-line multiple myeloma patients. The CARTITUDE-4 trial, for which there aren’t any hard data yet, represents the biggest development for Carvykti’s ability to compete with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Abecma since its approval last February.