Brent Saun­ders’ de­ci­sion to join the SPAC gold rush ap­pears to have paid off nice­ly, al­beit not quite as nice­ly as he and his for­mer Al­ler­gan col­leagues had hoped.

Saun­ders’ spe­cial pur­pose ac­qui­si­tion com­pa­ny Ves­per Health­care Ac­qui­si­tion raised $400 mil­lion, sell­ing 40 mil­lion shares at 10 bucks a pop. That’s a bit short of the $460 mil­lion he and for­mer Al­ler­gan ex­ec Man­isha Narasimhan had ini­tial­ly sten­ciled in as the max­i­mum po­ten­tial of­fer­ing, but it still leaves one of phar­ma’s most fa­mous — and oc­ca­sion­al­ly no­to­ri­ous — wheel­ers and deal­ers with one of the largest hauls for a life sci­ence shell com­pa­ny yet, eclips­ing the $385 mil­lion Cas­din Cap­i­tal and Corvex Man­age­ment raised ear­ly this month.

Ex­cit­ed for the next chap­ter! ⁦@Ves­per­Health⁩ https://t.co/tzF4OTvZJ5

— Brent Saun­ders (@brentl­saun­ders) Sep­tem­ber 29, 2020

Saun­ders will now have two years to find a new home for all that cash, look­ing in a hand­ful of fa­mil­iar ar­eas: med­ical aes­thet­ics, eye care, longevi­ty and well­ness.

Al­though the small hand­ful of life sci­ence SPACs to suc­cess­ful­ly merge with pri­vate com­pa­nies have large­ly been small­er, sev­er­al al­so came with ad­di­tion­al ex­ter­nal fund­ing to boost the over­all val­ue of the deal. Cerev­el, for in­stance, an­nounced they would go pub­lic ear­li­er this year on a deal that saw them merge with Per­cep­tive Ad­vi­sors’ $150 mil­lion SPAC and raise $445 mil­lion in a con­cur­rent pri­vate round.

Still, when Saun­ders first filed for the SPAC, one life sci­ences in­vestor told End­points News that it could trans­late in­to a com­pa­ny worth $1.5 bil­lion to $2 bil­lion — or in the range of what Re­lay Ther­a­peu­tics, the biggest biotech IPO in a year full of big biotech IPOs, was worth on its de­but.

And Saun­ders plans to own a de­cent chunk of the even­tu­al com­pa­ny; the S-1 not­ed he would re­tain 20% of the SPAC post-of­fer­ing.

So far, this marks just Saun­ders’ sec­ond pub­lic move since he avoid­ed a spot on Ab­b­Vie’s board post-buy­out. He al­so joined Bridge­Bio’s board, help­ing Neil Ku­mar steer an um­brel­la of com­pa­nies try­ing to rein­vent biotech.

For a man who very re­cent­ly had the work­ing hours of a Big Phar­ma CEO, that pre­sum­ably leaves room on his plate for more.

Gilead recently decided to pull two indications for its cancer drug Zydelig — in relapsed follicular B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (FL) and relapsed small lymphocytic leukemia (SLL) — after failing to complete the confirmatory trials required as part of the accelerated approvals from 2014.

“As the treatment landscape for FL and SLL has evolved, enrollment into the confirmatory study has been an ongoing challenge,” Gilead said in a statement, noting it formally notified the FDA of its decision to voluntarily withdraw these indications.