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.

A rumor that Amgen is closing in on buyout deal for Alexion has sparked a guessing game on just what kind of M&A strategy Amgen is pursuing and how much Alexion is worth.

Mizuho analyst Salim Syed first lent credence to the report out of the Spanish news outlet Intereconomía, which said Amgen is bidding as much as $200 per share. While the source may be questionable, “the concept of this happening doesn’t sound too crazy to me,” he wrote.

Eli Lilly is expanding its partnership with China’s Innovent in a deal involving a diabetes drug sitting in its Phase I reserves.

The two companies had jointly developed one of China’s first homegrown PD-1 agents, scoring an approval for Tyvyt (sintilimab) late last year for relapsed/refractory classical Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This time around, Lilly is out-licensing a piece of its diabetes pipeline, a leading franchise that has historically produced the top-selling Trulicity and Humalog.

Novartis $NVS may have given up, but Amgen $AMGN and Allergan $AGN are plowing ahead with their knockoff of Roche’s blockbuster biologic Rituxan in the United States.

Their copycat, ABP 798, was found to have a clinically equivalent impact as Rituxan — meeting the main goal of the study involving CD20-positive B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients. This is the second trial supporting the profile of the biosimilar. In January, it came through with positive PK results in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.