“Raise mon­ey when you can, not when you have to” has be­come a fa­mil­iar re­frain in the biotech world. On the heels of a land­mark break­through for in vi­vo CRISPR/Cas9 edit­ing, In­tel­lia Ther­a­peu­tics is cer­tain­ly tak­ing it to heart.

The gene edit­ing pi­o­neer has loaded up in a new pub­lic of­fer­ing that sold its shares at $145 a pop — a 60% jump from its clos­ing price on Fri­day, just ahead of an in­dus­try-shak­ing mile­stone. Over the week­end, it dropped ini­tial da­ta sug­gest­ing that it can use CRISPR to di­rect­ly ed­it DNA in hu­mans, of­fer­ing a land­mark proof-of-con­cept for the bur­geon­ing field.

Jen­nifer Doud­na

The gross pro­ceeds come in at $600 mil­lion, and you can ex­pect some de­duc­tions off that for ex­pens­es.

The cash will go to­ward clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of its lead pro­grams, the biotech wrote in an SEC fil­ing, as well as oth­er pipeline can­di­dates and the CRISPR plat­form — based on the work of No­bel lau­re­ate Jen­nifer Doud­na — as a whole.

The top pro­gram, now en­dowed with clin­i­cal da­ta, is a CRISPR/Cas9 sys­tem en­cased in a lipid nanopar­ti­cle that’s de­signed to cut a gene out of the liv­er cells of pa­tients with AT­TR amy­loi­do­sis, a dead­ly dis­ease where a mis­shapen pro­tein called TTR builds up and dam­ages or­gans through­out the body. Pa­tients who re­ceived a high dose of the ther­a­py saw their pro­tein lev­els fall be­tween 80% and 96%, in­di­cat­ing the ther­a­py per­ma­nent­ly cut the genome where de­sired.

Its shares have now crossed the $150 line to a his­toric high.

New data from HHS show that more than 162,000 courses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral Paxlovid were administered across the US over the past week, continuing a streak of increased usage of the pill, and signaling not only rising case numbers but more awareness of how to access it.

In comparison to this week, about 670,000 courses of the Pfizer pill have been administered across the first five months since Paxlovid has been on the US market, averaging about 33,000 courses administered per week in that time.

The FDA is offering more of an explanation of the guardrails around its program that may soon allow states to import prescription drugs in some select circumstances from Canada, but only if such imports will result in significant cost reductions for consumers.

While the agency has yet to sign off on any of the 5 state plans in the works so far, and PhRMA’s suit to block the Trump-era rule allowing such imports is stalled, the new Q&A guidance spells out the various restrictions that states will have to abide by, potentially signaling that a state approval is coming.

Leading the way to increase access to cheaper drugs worldwide, Pfizer said Wednesday it will provide all current and future patent-protected medicines and vaccines available in the US or EU on a not-for-profit basis to about 1.2 billion people in 45 lower-income countries.

Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal and Uganda are the first five countries to sign on to this accord, which will also seek to blaze new paths for quick and efficient regulatory and procurement processes to reduce the usual delays in making new medicines and vaccines available in these countries.