“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.

In the insular world of biotech, a spectacular failure can sometimes stay on any executive’s record for a long time. But for David Meek, the man at the helm of FerGene’s recent implosion, two questionable exits made way for what could be an excellent rebound.

Meek, most recently FerGene’s CEO and a past head at Ipsen, has become CEO at Mirati Therapeutics, taking the reins from founding CEO Charles Baum, who will step over into the role of president and head of R&D, according to a release.

For a first-time fund, Jeito Capital talks a lot about continuity.

Rafaèle Tordjman had spotlighted that concept ever since she started building the firm in 2018, promising to go the extra mile(s) with biotech entrepreneurs while pushing them to reach patients faster.

Coincidentally, the lack of continuity was one of the sore spots listed in a report about the European healthcare sector published that same year by the European Investment Bank — whose fund is one of the LPs, alongside the American pension fund Teacher Retirement System of Texas and Singapore’s Temasek, to help Jeito close its first fund at $630 million (€534 million). As previously reported, Sanofi had chimed in €50 million, marking its first investment in a French life sciences fund.

Biopharma’s resident antibody-drug conjugate expert Seagen has scored a clutch of oncology approvals in recent years, finding gold in what are known as “third-gen” ADCs. Now, another of their partnered conjugates is ready for prime time.

The FDA on Monday handed an accelerated approval to Seagen and Genmab’s Tivdak (tisotumab vedotin-tftv, or “TV”) in second-line patients with recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer who previously progressed after chemotherapy rather than PD-(L)1 systemic therapy, the companies said in a release.

Illumina Ventures closed off its second investment fund with a total commitment of $325 million, offering fresh fuel to back a slate of startups that have already included a smorgasbord of companies, covering everything from diagnostics to biotech drug development and genomics.

Fund II brings the total investment under Illumina Ventures’ oversight to $560 million, which has been focused on early-stage companies. And it has a transatlantic portfolio that includes SQZ, Twist and Encoded Therapeutics.