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%.

A couple months after raising CHF 2.5 million ($2.76 million) in initial seed funding, one-year-old Araris Biotech is topping off the round with another CHF 12.7 million ($14 million).

The Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich spinout now has CHF 15.2 million to work with, and CEO Philipp Spycher has big plans. He hopes to bring one of the company’s antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) to the clinic by late 2022 or early 2023. “It’s very, very ambitious, but we are very optimistic that we actually can make it,” he said.

Four years after a Phase I/II setback in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), Novartis is hoping its drug branaplam will find more success in a new neurological indication: Huntington’s disease.

The decision was announced a year after the head of research, Jay Bradner, said he did not see a “big opportunity” in SMA, according to Reuters. Novartis says it has preclinical data showing that branaplam reduces levels of mutant huntingtin protein, and SMA data showing patients on the drug had reductions in huntingtin mRNA. The FDA gave branaplam their orphan drug designation, and Novartis plans to move forth with a Phase IIb trial next year.

One of GlaxoSmithKline’s big projects at its global vaccine R&D center in Rockville, MD is set to enter Phase III after passing early-stage tests with flying colors.

Eyeing the wide-open respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) space, GSK is pushing two different vaccine candidates: GSK3888550A is designed to confer protection to infants via maternal immunization, while GSK3844766A is meant for the elderly.