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%.

When Michael Shpigelmacher started the project, he knew he’d have to fund it himself. Every other effort of its kind was academic, rejected as too risky by investors.

Shpigelmacher, a robotics geek and entrepeneur who had drifted into consulting for pharma, wanted to build the real-life equivalent of technology from the 1960s film Fantastic Voyage, the one where a submarine crew is shrunk to “about the size of a microbe” and sent on a mission to repair a scientist’s brain. He scanned the literature, found the lab that was working on the most advanced project — at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, it turned out — and started funding them with money from his own account, along with some seed cash from friends and family.

Four years ago, when Arena CEO Amit Munshi cut its ties to a troubled weight drug and doubled down on the pipeline, a cannabinoid receptor 2 agonist figured prominently in the biotech’s future. On Tuesday evening, however, Munshi’s high hopes for the drug took a nasty hit after it failed a Phase IIb study for patients with irritable bowel syndrome pain.

Put through a randomized pace with 273 patients, researchers said it flat failed the primary endpoint among the large group with abdominal pain. But they quickly went on to highlight subgroup data, always a tricky and controversial ploy, where they spotlighted a positive p value for patients with moderate to severe pain who received the high dose of the drug — one of 3 provided in the study.

As the superbug crisis heats up around the world, Scynexis says it has new data from two interim analyses that prove its antifungal has the potential to treat a broad range of infections.

“The need for new anti-infectives capable of fighting the most resistant pathogens has never been more urgent as we confront the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic,” CEO Marco Taglietti said in a statement.

When Takeda spun out a pipeline of experimental psychiatry drugs to Neurocrine in a $2 billion deal amid a post-merger shakeout, R&D chief Andy Plump described the therapies as “very interesting but still difficult.”

On Tuesday, we got some idea of how difficult.

San Diego-based Neurocrine revealed that one of the three spotlight clinical programs they’d acquired failed the primary endpoint in a Phase II trial for schizophrenia, registering a negative outcome on the change from baseline in the positive and negative syndrome scale/negative symptom factor score (PANSS NSFS).

Merck took a big gamble when it opted to jump into the Covid-19 vaccine race late, and made an equally momentous decision to back out in late January. Now, looking to chip in on the effort, Merck reportedly agreed to team up with one of the companies that has already crossed the finish line.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday is expected to announce a partnership between drugmakers Merck and Johnson & Johnson to jointly produce J&J’s recombinant protein Covid-19 vaccine that received the FDA’s emergency use authorization Saturday, the Washington Post reported.