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%.

What’s Biohaven without its CGRP portfolio? That’s what CEO Vlad Coric is tasked with deciding as he maps out the new Biohaven post-Pfizer takeover.

Pfizer officially scooped up Biohaven’s CGRP assets on Monday, including blockbuster migraine drug Nurtec and the investigational zavegepant, for $11.6 billion. As a result, Coric spun the broader pipeline into an independent company on Tuesday — with the same R&D team behind Nurtec but about 1,000 fewer staffers and a renewed focus on neuroscience and rare disease.

There are some odd-looking purple creatures lurking around the halls of AstraZenca lately. The “Phil” character cutouts are purple, personified eosinophils with big buggy eyes and wide mouths, and they’re a part of AZ’s newest awareness effort to help people understand eosinophilic asthma.

The “Asthma Behaving Badly” characters aren’t only on the walls at AZ to show the new campaign to employees, however. The “Phils” are also showing up online on the campaign website, and in digital and social ads and posts on Facebook and Instagram.

As Leo Pharma aims to take on heavyweight champ Dupixent in atopic dermatitis, the company is launching “AD Days Around the World,” an awareness campaign documenting real patient stories across Europe.

The project, unveiled on Monday, spotlights four patients: Marjolaine, Laura, Julia and África from France, Italy, Germany and Spain, respectively, in short video clips on the challenges of living with AD, the most common form of eczema.