Rough­ly four and half years af­ter se­cur­ing $26.5 mil­lion in a Clarus Ven­tures-led Se­ries A, San Fran­cis­co biotech Ima­go Bio­Sciences has an­oth­er $40 mil­lion in the bank to de­vel­op its bone mar­row-fo­cused ther­a­py, cour­tesy a fi­nanc­ing round led by Omega Funds.

The pri­vate­ly-held drug de­vel­op­er is tar­get­ing the man­age­ment of pro­lif­er­a­tive dis­eases of the bone mar­row — in­clud­ing acute myeloid leukemia (AML), myelodys­plas­tic syn­drome, poly­cythemia ve­ra, myelofi­bro­sis and es­sen­tial throm­bo­cythemia — that trig­ger un­bri­dled bone mar­row cell growth, dri­ven by ge­net­ic mu­ta­tions.

Its lead drug IMG-7289 is de­signed to in­hib­it LSD1, an en­zyme reg­u­lat­ing cy­tokine ex­pres­sion that is con­sid­ered cru­cial for sus­tain­ing self-re­new­al in can­cer stem/prog­en­i­tor cells, par­tic­u­lar­ly neo­plas­tic bone mar­row cells. It is be­ing test­ed in a Phase II myelofi­bro­sis study, and last year com­plet­ed a Phase I AML/MDS study. The cap­i­tal in­jec­tion will be used to shep­herd the ex­per­i­men­tal drug through the com­ple­tion of Phase IIb stud­ies, the com­pa­ny said on Thurs­day.

The name Ima­go in­vokes the fi­nal and ful­ly de­vel­oped stage of an in­sect af­ter its meta­mor­pho­sis, and the com­pa­ny is hop­ing to do the same by trans­lat­ing sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry in­to new treat­ments.

Oth­er in­vestors par­tic­i­pat­ing in the round in­clude ex­ist­ing in­vestors Fra­zier Health­care Part­ners, Am­gen Ven­tures, and MRL Ven­tures Fund as well as High­Light Cap­i­tal, Phar­maron and Green­spring As­so­ci­ates. Omega Funds’ Di­na Chaya from is slat­ed to join Ima­go’s board.

An­oth­er com­pa­ny look­ing in­to the po­ten­tial of in­hibit­ing LSD1 is In­cyte $IN­CY, which is test­ing its drug IN­CB059872 for Ew­ing sar­co­ma and oth­er can­cers.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

Money has never been an issue for Everest Medicines. With an essentially open tab from their founders at C-Bridge Capital, the biotech has gone two and a half years racking up drug after drug, bringing in top exec after top exec, and issuing clinical update after update.

But now other investors want in — and they’re betting big.

Everest is closing its Series C at $310 million. The first $50 million comes from the Jiashan National Economic and Technological Development Zone; the remaining C-2 tranche was led by Janchor Partners, with RA Capital Management and Hillhouse Capital as co-leaders. Decheng Capital, GT Fund, Janus Henderson Investors, Rock Springs Capital, Octagon Investments all joined.

It’s been precisely one year and one day since Neil Woodford froze his once-vaunted fund, and while a global pandemic has recently shielded him from the torrent of headlines, the fallout continues.

Today, the California-based patent licensing firm Acacia Research acquired the fund’s shares for 19 healthcare and biotech companies for $284 million.  Those companies include shares for public and private companies and count some of Woodford’s most prominent bio-bets, such as Theravance Biopharma, Oxford Nanopore and Mereo Biopharma, according to Sky News, which first reported the sale. It won’t include shares for BenevelontAI, the machine learning biotech once valued at $2 billion.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.