→ Ear­li­er this month, Ger­man can­cer drug de­vel­op­er BioN­Tech laid out plans for a $100 mil­lion pub­lic list­ing in the US, two months af­ter un­veil­ing a mas­sive $325 mil­lion in an up­sized round of fi­nanc­ing. How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny lat­er re­vealed that shares worth about $97 mil­lion had been de­layed due to the po­lit­i­cal un­rest in Hong Kong and the on­go­ing trade ten­sions be­tween the US and Chi­na. To­day, the com­pa­ny an­nounced its plans to of­fer 13.2 mil­lion Amer­i­can de­pos­i­to­ry shares at a price range of $18 to $20 to raise $251 mil­lion. At the mid­point of the pro­posed range, BioN­Tech would com­mand a ful­ly di­lut­ed mar­ket val­ue of $4.5 bil­lion. The com­pa­ny plans to list un­der the sym­bol $BN­TX.

Joint bookrun­ners in­clude JP Mor­gan, Bo­fA Mer­rill Lynch, UBS In­vest­ment Bank and SVB Leerink.

→ Bay­er, Brigham and Women’s Hos­pi­tal and Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal are join­ing forces to launch a joint lab to re­search new drug can­di­dates to treat chron­ic lung dis­eases. “The joint lab will host sci­en­tists from all three par­ties and Bay­er is in­vest­ing more than USD 30 mil­lion to fund joint re­search projects over the next five years,” they wrote in a state­ment.

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.

For nearly a decade now, the low-profile Cambridge biotech Kymab has been battling in US, UK, Japanese and Australian courts with the biotech behemoth Regeneron.

Regeneron has turned itself into a $70 billion company off of a platform of transgenically humanized mice they can use to make antibodies for anything from Ebola to colorectal cancer. The technology took decades and billions to build, 20 years from the company’s founding to the first approved drug. And the company guards and touts it zealously, breaking their production process down into various branded components — Velocimmune, Velocigene, Velocimouse and four other Velocis — and sometimes suing would-be copycats. In 2014, most notably, they sued two Pfizer-backed entities for patent infringement.