Last No­vem­ber’s news about As­traZeneca launch­ing a $1 bil­lion ven­ture fund with Chi­na In­ter­na­tion­al Cap­i­tal Cor­po­ra­tion (CI­CC) to in­vest in up-and-com­ing play­ers was wide­ly viewed as il­lus­tra­tive of the British drug­mak­er’s am­bi­tions in Chi­na. As it turns out, it’s just as much about CI­CC — Chi­na’s largest in­vest­ment bank — and its plans in bio­med­i­cine.

Days af­ter an­nounc­ing the As­traZeneca fund, state-backed CI­CC dis­closed that it’s team­ing up with 11 do­mes­tic firms to raise a fund ded­i­cat­ed to in­no­v­a­tive drugs, in vit­ro di­ag­no­sis, med­ical tech­nol­o­gy and health IT. It’s now closed at $229 mil­lion (RMB$1.6 bil­lion), ac­cord­ing to a state­ment.

Brand­ed as Chi­na’s an­swer to Gold­man Sachs since it was launched in 1995 with Mor­gan Stan­ley, CI­CC has un­der­writ­ten sev­er­al biotech IPOs in re­cent years in­clud­ing those of I-Mab, Jun­shi and Hen­lius.

CI­CC Cap­i­tal, its pri­vate eq­ui­ty arm, is in charge of man­ag­ing the new fund. With close to $43 bil­lion (RMB$300 bil­lion) in as­sets, CI­CC Cap­i­tal has made bio­med­i­cine one of three pil­lars of its di­rect in­vest­ment port­fo­lio along­side IT and con­sumer busi­ness. Can­cer drug de­vel­op­er Ab­bisko and wound care spe­cial­ist Ten­ry Phar­ma are among its bets.

No­tably, it’s al­so chan­neled its mon­ey in­to VC funds — giv­ing it a stake in big-name health­care-fo­cused play­ers such as Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures, Qim­ing Ven­ture Part­ners, High­Light Cap­i­tal and LYFE Cap­i­tal.

For the new fund, it’s chipped in around $2.9 mil­lion, while Shen­zhen-list­ed Pharscin Phar­ma, Hebei Port Group, Xi­a­men Fig Group, Fu­jian Sun­ner Group, Huirong Qide In­vest­ment, Xi’an Huirong, Xin­wen Ven­ture Cap­i­tal (a sub­sidiary of Sichuan Dai­ly Press Group) and oth­ers pro­vid­ed the rest.

No an­nounce­ment about fund­ing bio­med­i­cine these days is com­plete with­out al­lud­ing to the coro­n­avirus out­break out of Wuhan. CI­CC Cap­i­tal de­vot­ed a con­sid­er­ate por­tion of its brief state­ment to high­light that it’s been in con­tact with mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies to help ac­cel­er­ate de­vel­op­ment of nu­cle­ic acid di­ag­nos­tics, ther­a­peu­tic an­ti­bod­ies, an­tivi­rals as well as vac­cines.

It al­so said its new bio­med­ical fund is the first in­vest­ment fund to have gone through a new fi­nan­cial reg­is­tra­tion path­way set up ear­li­er this month specif­i­cal­ly for funds geared at pre­ven­tion and con­tain­ment of the coro­n­avirus out­break.

“Not on­ly does the Chi­nese bio­med­ical in­dus­try shoul­der great in­no­v­a­tive chal­lenges un­der the epi­dem­ic, it’s al­so ush­ered in a rare de­vel­op­ment op­por­tu­ni­ty,” the firm stat­ed.

There’s no sign that the windfall of cash dropping biotech’s way on Wall Street is abating. Three more biopharmas priced IPOs on Thursday and Friday morning, riding a historic boom with a $364 million payoff.

London-based biotech Freeline Therapeutics took home the lion’s share of the cash with $159 million after pricing 8,823,529 shares at $18 a pop. Checkmate Pharmaceuticals, of Cambridge, MA, raised $75 million with an offer of 5 million shares at $15 — right at the midpoint of its range. And Arya Sciences Acquisition Corp III, the third in a series from Perceptive, priced 13,000,000 shares at $10 per share.

AbbVie has resolved a California lawsuit alleging insurance fraud in the promotion of its cash cow Humira, paying $24 million to settle things with the state’s insurance regulator.

The settlement comes almost four years after a whistleblower first reported AbbVie’s practice of deploying registered nurses to visit patients at home or call them by phone to ensure that Humira prescriptions are filled. AbbVie was also charged with providing illegal kickbacks to doctors in an attempt to encourage them to prescribe Humira for a range of anti-inflammatory diseases.

→ Alexion has carved out a new position for chief diversity officer and filled it with an inside promotion.

Uzair Qadeer will now be responsible for their “diversity, inclusion and belonging” strategy, looking to reshape the biotech’s corporate culture. A veteran of Deloitte and Bristol Myers Squibb, Qadeer was working on executive coaching and helping create the diversity program he now leads.