Blue­bird bio is look­ing for cash.

Wednes­day morn­ing, the gene ther­a­py biotech an­nounced that it was look­ing to sell 20 mil­lion shares of its stock $BLUE, which at Tues­day’s clos­ing price of $7.28, would trans­late to rough­ly $145 mil­lion. In ad­di­tion, as part of the of­fer­ing, un­der­writ­ers — in­clud­ing Gold­man Sachs and JP Mor­gan — can buy an ad­di­tion­al 3 mil­lion shares of stock, which would be around an­oth­er $20 mil­lion.

In re­ac­tion to the news, how­ev­er, blue­bird’s stock dropped around 10% when the mar­kets opened.

Two weeks ago, blue­bird al­so sold a pri­or­i­ty re­view vouch­er for $95 mil­lion to Bris­tol My­ers Squibb. The biotech re­ceived two pri­or­i­ty re­view vouch­ers af­ter win­ning ap­proval for two gene ther­a­pies — Skysona and Zyn­te­glo. It sold its first vouch­er to ar­genx for $102 mil­lion in No­vem­ber.

In a press re­lease, blue­bird said it would use the mon­ey to pay for com­mer­cial work and man­u­fac­tur­ing for Zyn­te­glo and Skysona, which were ap­proved last year. Zyn­te­glo was ap­proved for the rare blood dis­or­der be­ta tha­lassemia and Skysona for cere­bral adrenoleukody­s­tro­phy, or CALD, a rare neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease that pri­mar­i­ly im­pacts young boys.

The biotech is ex­pect­ing its first rev­enue from Zyn­te­glo this quar­ter, and plans to col­lect cells from its first Skysona pa­tient this quar­ter as well, it said at JPM.

Blue­bird said the mon­ey from the pub­lic of­fer­ing would al­so go to­ward po­ten­tial fu­ture com­mer­cial ac­tiv­i­ties for its sick­le cell dis­ease gene ther­a­py, known as lo­vo-cel. The biotech plans to sub­mit lo­vo-cel to the FDA this quar­ter.

At JPM, blue­bird said that its cur­rent run­way will be enough to keep it go­ing through the first quar­ter of 2024. At the time, it said it had $182 mil­lion but ex­pect­ed that its 2023 cash burn would be some­where be­tween $270 and $300 mil­lion.

At its peak in 2018, blue­bird’s stock was worth over $100 per share — its val­ue has tanked over 90% over the last five years. Its jour­ney to de­vel­op gene ther­a­pies has been an ar­du­ous one fea­tur­ing tri­al stops, and though blue­bird’s gene ther­a­pies were ap­proved in Eu­rope first, blue­bird pulled the plug on all its ac­tiv­i­ties in Eu­rope af­ter it couldn’t agree with gov­ern­ments on pric­ing. Last year, in a cost-sav­ing move pri­or to its ap­proval de­ci­sions, blue­bird laid off around a third of its staff.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.